Hi Craig,

Here is my experience with these two options.

Looker Studio + Blending

This is the option I use when I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing and still in the process of changing my mind. Looker Studio connectors give you immediate access to all dimensions and metrics, which makes it a great exploration tool.

However, because each time you load a report it makes a connection to the API, it is a bit slower than data from Google Sheets – depending on the API/connector (It is mostly the API that is slower, not the connector). As soon as you start blending data from two connectors, this difference becomes more noticeable.

Data Prep in Google Sheets

As the title suggests, you do a lot of work in Google Sheets. What you are basically doing in many cases is re-aggregating the data (I will do a quick demo on this topic in the next webinar).

The downside here is that each sheet can’t have more than 9 dimensions, so a bit of planning is required. Dont’t forget, you will need to switch between Sheets and Looker Studio, which may not feel intuitive.

As long as you know where you want to go and speed is your main factor, working with Google Sheets is a great method.

Data Warehouses

Using Google Sheets is basically a first step towards a data warehouse. There is a limit of 1 million rows in Google Sheets. If you hit this limit, it’s time to switch to something more elaborate.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

ralph

@dataviz - that’s an informative and awesome answer. You shed light on a future state for our operations. Thank you. I’m also keen to see your next webinar!