Creating Visualizations in Google Data Studio

Create New report on Airbnb Boston reviews

To create a new report from scratch, a portion of the Kaggle dataset of the Airbnb reviews in Boston has been uploaded into a shared Google Sheets to be used as data source for Google Data Studio.

• the full Kaggle dataset of the Airbnb reviews in Boston is available at https://www.kaggle.com/airbnb/boston

• the Google Sheets, with approximately 10k reviews, to be used as data source is available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a2c9vCMFFfDXmhjoEoX2EwS2lYTbqE4WfZY72TXW9co/ edit#gid=285360760

• Spend some time to understand the data by reading their description on Kaggle and looking at the table on Google Sheets.

• The data-source table has been created by joining the “Listings” and “Reviews” original tables provided by Kaggle, and exporting the first 10k joined rows sorted by ascending “listing_id”.

Create a new report

• Go to the Data Studio home page

• Click on “Start a new report” (Blank)

• Rename the “Untitled Report” with a name of your choice by clicking on the name itself

• Create a new data source by clicking on the blue button on the bottom right, or select the Airbnb data source if it is already present in the right-pane list

Connect to the Google Sheet data source by using its URL:

• Choose the “Google Sheets” connector in the list of connectors on the left

• Choose the “URL” option in the first column

• Paste the Airbnb-data Google Sheet URL in the specific field: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a2c9vCMFFfDXmhjoEoX2EwS2lYTbqE4WfZY72TXW9co/ edit#gid=285360760

• Choose the “Reviews Query DW” worksheet in the next column

• Tick the option to “use the first row as headers” if it is not ticked yet

• Click on the “Connect” button to execute the connection to the data source

Dimensions, metrics, and transformations

• Check the type and aggregation of each field and that all the fields are correctly interpreted as either dimension or metric.

• Create new useful fields (dimensions or metrics) from the existing ones by exploiting formulas, such as in the following (click on the “+” and “fx” placeholders). For details on this step, see: https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/6299685?hl=en

  • CONCAT(latitude, CONCAT(', ', longitude)) → to generate a (lat, long) field useful for map charts; before generating this new field, set “Aggregation=None” for latitude and longitude fields, so that they become dimensions (by default, Data Studio considers them as metrics)

After creating new fields and updating the existing ones, click on “Add to report”

Analyze the data

Analyze the data by building the following visualizations. Then, explore and create new visualizations to find interesting insights on your own.

• Analysis (1): Number of Records over time

Analysis (2):

• analyzing the number of different reviewers for each (lat, long) locationnote that the Kaggle dataset of the Airbnb reviews is in Boston, Massachusetts, US

Allow end-users to filter the data under analysis by selecting a date range and city name.