Google Data Studio connector for Airtable

[Rupert_Snook]

Hey Airtable team, have you come across Google Data Studio? It’s a free tool that is excellent for visualising data and creating BI dashboards - a perfect companion to Airtable.

Google Data Studio has ‘community connectors’ that allow users to pipe in data from third party services such as yourselves. I’m trying my hand at building a private connector for one of my bases at the moment, and it’s not too tricky.

So, my request is for you folks to build a public ‘community connector’ that anyone could use to connect their Airtable data to Google Data Studio! More info here: https://developers.google.com/datastudio/connector/developer-launch/

[Daniel_McNichol]

Hi Raul,

Thanks for the response & for your work on this connector, fulfilling an obvious need of the community!

It’s helpful to know about the other options you mention, which might result in similar performance as the Extract Data source, with at least one less layer of data sources to manage. We will experiment with this as well.

One problem we might encounter is that it seems that only one account is authorized to create the Community Connector, which might become a bottleneck in the process. Currently, once they create the connector data source to a table with all fields included, they can share access to the data source, & the rest of the team can use the Extract Data source to select the fields they currently need. Not sure if there is a similar way to enable team self-sufficiency with the connector alone, without every team member having a paid subscription? (or sharing a single account)

Thanks again!

[Raul_Garcia]

Hi Daniel,

Many thanks for your comments.

Not only can those features be used as an alternative to Extract Data but also in combination for faster performance if needed.

We always encourage teams to share the data source set up by the owner of the account. If you select to share with ‘Edit’ permission, they should be able to update the primary data source (not create new ones) and link it to Extract data as you mention:

The user without a DataStudents account will see a message similar to the one below, but they will be able to make changes to the data source (while they wouldn’t be able to if they were trying to create a new one).

On the other side, we need to limit the users to one GMail/Google Workspace account per subscription: Otherwise, we would have, for example, agencies using one subscription to connect data for many of their clients.

Thanks a lot!

[Daniel_McNichol]

Thanks Raul!

That makes sense, understand wanting to limit agencies using a single subscription for many clients. This does create a bit of a workflow bottleneck for small teams though, especially if there is already hesitancy to bring on another paid 3rd party service.

But such is the modern SaaS landscape I suppose.

Thanks again for your replies!