Looker Studio for Athletics Schedule

We continue to find ways in which Looker Studio, formerly known as Data Studio, can be used to help visualize data differently. (NOTE: In the example provided, no student data is used). For years, our Athletic Director at the high school posts a monthly schedule of all sport practices, games/meets, team meetings etc that happen as to way to make sure that all athletes and parents are on the same page. But how can we make this schedule experience better? Welcome Looker Studio.

The athletics schedule had always been created in a Google Sheet. The community was given view access each month so that they can scroll through and find the events that pertain to them. The one missing element was being able to sort the data easily. This meant that users had to scroll through all of the events and hope that they didn’t miss a practice or a game. The athletic director would hide dates once they passed so that those events no longer showed to help with the view of the sheet; meaning that once a date happened, the row was hidden. Below is a gif showing what one calendar view looked like:

TRANSITION TO LOOKER STUDIO

Now with Looker Studio, the community can easily filter their view to the way they want it. They can sort by program, by team, by purpose or any combination of those options. Other advantages:

With this particular Looker Studio, we have the date set so that when a community member opens up the schedule, it will only show events from a range of today’s date out 4 weeks.
No longer need to create multiple spreadsheets for each month. All data is entered into one spreadsheet

Below is a gif showing what the schedule now looks.

In order to help the community transition to the new look, a quick Flip video was made to assist – we wanted to make sure that the community knew that they could sort the data. We embedded this video on the Looker Studio for ease as well.

SMART CHIPS

As a side note, I am loving the new smart chips feature in Google Sheets. Very clean looking and easily allows for color coordination. By using Smart Chips, it helps eliminate human error of misspelling a word – this way we can make sure that all data shows when filter is applied in Looker Studio. One could argue that time is also saved by not having to type everything. The gif below shows you what the spreadsheet looks like – this spreadsheet ‘talks’ to the athletic schedule Looker Studio