So in this post I’ll show you how to make what I’ve called an Interactive List of People in Google Data Studio.

For this example I’ve come up with a fictional company and it’s list of fake employees.

The Interactive List of People dashboard

Below is the interactive dashboard showing the list of employees at the fictional Compu Global Hyper Meganet company.

You can filter by city or by department. You can then click on each person’s name on the list and their photo and details will appear.

I’ll go through the steps you need to build out this dashboard.

Step 1: Create your data in Google Sheets

So the main component of this dashboard are the photographs of the fake staff. So to create those I used ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com to create some fake photos, then uploaded them to Imgur.

In our Google Sheet I created some fake news to go with the fake photos, added in the three fictional office locations (Toronto, Montreal and New York) and some departments.

Importantly I added in a URL to each photo on Imgur in the column Photo URL.

Step 2: Add the Google Sheets data to Data Studio

So then I added my Data to Google Data Studio using the Google Sheets connector.

Once I had added my data I needed to make a photo field.

So I simply created a new filed name ‘Photo’ and used the formula IMAGE(Photo URL). You can read my previous blog post on the topic if you’d like more detail on how to add photos to Google Data Studio.

The next custom field to create was that of ‘Description’. This will create a one sentence description of the staff member selected.

I used the following formula:
CONCAT(Name,” works in the “,Department,” department at our “,Office,” office. You can email “,Name,” at “,Email,”.”)

Once we have our description field created we can build out our dashboard.

Step 3: Add the Google Sheets data to Data Studio

So some of the tables are pretty basic, so I’ll just focus on the main ones. The most prominent table is the image of the person selected. This is simply a table with the Photo dimension and no metric selected, as shown below.

The same goes for the description table that adjusts (along with the photo) based on which person is top of the list of employees.

I’ve also added in some filters for you to adjust which staff members are displayed. For example in the screenshot below I’ve selected the city to be Toronto and the department to be Marketing. So we only see the two marketing staff members in Toronto.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the name Compu Global Hyper Meganet comes from…

My Other Blog Posts

I hope you found this post useful and interesting! If you did you might enjoy some of my other blog posts.