Make Your Data Studio Reports Mobile-Friendly

I love Data Studio.
Great tool, absolutely free, and I can link it to anything I want and create fantastic reports for myself and my clients. You may have guessed from the title that the platform has one big drawback: Data Studio’s reports system is pretty much a canvas system – you paint on it, like on a canvas. This canvas has a certain size, and we fill it with metrics, graphs, and charts. And just like any canvas system, Data Studio is non-responsive. It didn’t really bother me at first, but then one day, a client asked, and one thing led to another and we started working on this problem: how do you create a mobile-friendly report in Data Studio?

Step 1: What do you need for a mobile report?

Due to size constraints and because Data Studio was not designed for mobile, a lot of elements aren’t going to look great. Choosing a date? Forget about it. Flipping through charts? Maybe, as long as you don’t go overboard with the size of the chart and the amount of data. Think about what you want to have on this report – preferably graphs, trends, pie charts, and my personal favorite, scorecards. You’re better off forgoing drop-down and filters. The fewer user interactions, the better.

Step 2: Duplicate Report

Yup. We can’t tell Google to make our report responsive; instead, we have to create a new report and adapt it to mobile. This means that if we make any changes, we have to do them twice – once in the old report, and once in the new one. But anything to make you happy! Go to the existing report, open the File tab, and click Make a Copy.
When you replicate, Google will ask you about data sources and effectively let you make a copy of the report and also connect it to different data sources. Ignore that. Click Create Report and bam! You’re in your new report. Name it something that makes it clear that this is a mobile version (say, Main report – mobile compatible.)

Step 3: Canvas Settings

At this point, I recommend that you highlight all elements – graphs, etc. – Minimize them, shrink fonts, minimize space and align to the left as much as possible, and leave the right side as empty as you can. Don’t worry if the objects override each other.
Next, click the white canvas in the background. This window will pop up on your right:

• Under Header visibility, choose Auto-hide. Once you enter the report, you will no longer see the toolbar.
• If your report is comprised of several sheets, either merge them all into one or add navigation buttons to flip between pages. To do that, choose Left under Navigation position. If you don’t have any other reports and everything fits on the same page, choose Top.
• In Display mode, choose Fit to width. This will make Google play around with the design so that all of the components fit the width. And no, it’s not responsive, but it helps.
• Most importantly, in canvas dimensions, choose a width of 300-400 pixels. The height is up to you – even 2000 pixels works.
• Organize some of your graphs and matrices, at least in the top section.
• Click the share button, copy the link, and open it on your mobile.
• Keep tweaking the report until it looks like a million dollars.
• Send your client the link. You can create shortcuts on your smartphone home screen.
• And there you have it – a mobile-compatible report!

Result

These are side-by-side screenshots from my phone. The left one is vertical, and the right one is the same report, but this time it’s split into different sheets, with a navigation button on the left.