Features

Google Data Studio navigation & pages management features

October 7, 2021 - by Mehdi Oudjida
Google Data Studio navigation and pages management features

The Google Data Studio team has just released amazing new features about the navigation and pages management of your reports:

  • Report makers get a new experience – as editors – for pages creation & management, smoother than before and saving a lot of time
  • New features enhancing the navigation are now available: headers, sections, icons, dividers…

Congratulations to GDS product designers, they made a great job, adding a lot of new features, streamlining their access and keeping the software interface as simple as it was. Well done!

Most of us are familiar with other Google Tools. With this release, you will also discover that best practices & components from Google Material Design are predominant inside the new panel for pages management.
It is definitely for the good of the Data Studio user interface.

So now, let’s review the released features!

1. Full overview

Through the videos below and before providing details about each feature, let’s make a full review of the new pages management system and the related navigation.

Starting with pages management on edit mode…

Then, switching on view mode with left navigation, then tab version to see the result…

2. Report pages panel

2.1. Access

Contrary to the previous version, the pages management is now isolated in a dedicated panel for edition purposes. This panel is available through a click on page navigation (page X of Y). This item on the tool bar has been slightly moved to the right but still give access to the pages panel through the same click. Instead of displaying a dropdown menu with pages list, now it opens a panel “Report pages” at the right of the window.

Google Data Studio old menu for pages management
Before
Google Data Studio new panel for pages management
After

2.2. Panel anatomy

All the features to manage your pages and customize your report navigation are accessible in this new panel displaying:

  1. Page search by keyword
  2. The list of pages and navigation items
  3. A “+” button to add an item, and by default a page
Google Data Studio pages report panel
Edit mode – Report pages panel

2.3. Pages & items additions

Hover the cursor on “+” button, you can add in your report, in addition to pages (blue in the items list), you can add the following new types of item through a sub panel:

  • Divider (pink in the items list)
  • Header (orange)
  • Section (green)
Add pages or navigation item on Google Data Studio
Add pages or navigation items

2.4. Item actions

Each item gets its actions menu (kebab menu at the right – 3 vertical dots) with a set of actions according to the kind of item and its position in the list:

  • Existing options on the previous version: Rename, Duplicate, Delete and Hide/Show in view mode
  • “Select icon” new feature
  • Move to top and move to bottom, …so welcomed actions 🤗
  • Move up and down to change the position of the item without drag’n drop
Data Studio report pages panel - Item actions
Item actions

3. New features

3.1. Divider

Dividers are simple elements to separate sets of pages and items inside the navigation of the report. They are visible regardless of the selected type of navigation (left, tab, or top left navigations).

Divider of Google Data Studio navigation

3.2. Header

Visible only for left & top left navigation types, header allows to create topics for sets of pages.

Header of Google Data Studio navigation

3.3. Section

Visible for all navigation types, sections are items to group pages and create two-level expandable sub menus inside the navigation:

  • A more advanced solution of grouping, comparing to headers
  • A nice way to build 3 levels of contents (and 2 levels of sections)
  • A solution to reduce the number of items for tab navigation type, and avoid related horizontal scrolling

For the moment:

  • It is not possible to add dividers and headers inside sections
  • You need to delete elements included in the section before deleting the section itself (no delete cascading)
Section of Google Data Studio navigation

3.4. Section & page icons

Grey icons can be added to illustrate pages & sections at the first level of navigation. The report designer can select icons from a library of the 72 icons.

Icon for Data Studio pages and sections

3.5. Improvement of pages management

At last, the addition of this amazing panel of pages management with navigation features is also supported with a really (really) welcomed improvement of page management. 🤗

New pages are added just below the active page or the duplicated page! No more endless drag and drop of pages added by default at the end!

Before 😞

After 😊😊😊

Now, it is your turn to play and build creative report navigations. Enjoy!

“Tu devrais te remettre un peu à la page…”