What if the Looker Studio timeline / Gantt chart was a teletext display system…just for fun
As you probably already know, a new chart type has been released last week by the Looker Studio team:
Timeline chart!
It is an efficient feature to include any planning inside your reports through Gantt chart.
And so, it helps to correlate your data trends with your activities/temporal signals (offline and online campaigns, application releases, holidays calendar…).
The possibilities are endless and I hope writing a blog post about them in the future, like I’ve done before, creating custom solutions to insert event annotations or putting marketing plan inside Looker Studio time series charts.
So, I’ve started testing this new chart type. The main difference of usage about timeline chart is the data model.
Contrary to any usual data source in digital analytics fields, the rows are date-range oriented, not single-date oriented.
so I took a planning…wait a minute…it is not a planning 🙂
It is just an opportunity to play with:
- A low definition of the logo of Looker Studio, transformed to a matrix of pixels
- Some BigQuery scripting for dynamic pivoting
- A final BigQuery query to create a visualization table, applying the classic technique of “gaps & islands” to group consecutive date rows by task and by category and get date ranges, and so respect the required data model
And, at the end, I use the table as the data source of my first timeline chart.
A funny way to test a new feature and improve my BigQuery scripting and SQL skills.
And now, I also know that the new Timeline chart can display at least 580 timelines or teletext lines to draw a logo.
And now, if you want to play with this report, I share it for you! Feel free to test the dark mode 😛
Voila
