data strategy

Harness the power of Google Sheets with Dataddo

Posted on by Jan Indra

Integrating table data with your existing systems has never been easier

Few products offered within the Google Suite portfolio have been used in so many various ways and for so many different purposes as Google Sheets. Taking the original concept developed over decades by Microsoft with Excel (and adapted by open-source developers with OpenOffice Calc), Google successfuly moved the world of spreadsheets, conditional formatting, filtering and analysis into the cloud.

Providing its users with the possibility of having multiple users work on one sheet, having any sheet constantly updated or being able to access and edit your data from any device, Google Sheets yields very high returns in terms of flexibility. The company itself puts stress on various add-ons and the ability to obtain instant statistics and basic graphs.

That being said, preparing your data so it can be extensively analyzed is a difficult task on its own . Being able to identify the intrinsic value of your data is quite another.

Despite the great functionalities Google Sheets has to offer, a company aiming to have robust and coherent analytic capabilities will likely need to utilize a collection of other third-party software products. Whether we are talking about Tableau or PowerBI for visualisation, Salesforce or SAP for customer relationship management (CRM), or any other piece of software, chances are your company will have a hard time adjusting the underlying data in Google Sheets for any of the tools that could utilize them.

That’s because different tools more often than not require different logic of how data is structured, forcing companies to invest significant resources into customized, tailored solutions for their data architecture and data management.

To provide you with an analogy – rather than spending money on buying a car that will get you from destination A to destination B in the most efficient way, each company has its own, slightly specific car, with various parts, levers and compartments that might look nice but prove not that useful once you start fully using them. And what’s worse – as the technology around you develops, sooner or later there will come a time when your car is simply not capable of switching an engine or tires, but needs to be replaced as a whole.

And you can wave all that money thrown into constructing your precious car goodbye.

That being said, this line of narrative also expects that your company has enough qualified and knowledgeable drivers (i.e. data scientists) who know the car perfectly, are able to drive it smoothly and avoid any potential crashes or pitfalls. Finding those drivers is hard, losing any of them even harder. And despite some recurring headlines, it does not seem that the data science jobs market is gonna become saturated anytime soon (at the time of writing this article, LinkedIn listed more than 162 K jobs related to data science worldwide).

It feels natural then that rather than subjugating your company data architecture and existing processes to the data source, your data should be allowed to seamlessly flow from one platform to the other, ensuring as little time-consuming tinkering and irreversible adjusting as possible.

Such integration has never been easier than with our dedicated Dataddo Google Sheets connector. The connector can integrate your data stored within Google Sheets with all the major visualisation and dashboarding tools.

Furthermore, Dataddo provides REST API for low-level implementation of your data with various other apps, leaving your creativity to wander in terms of what other tool (now or in the future) you might wanna use to harness the power of your Google Sheets.

And the best thing?

Dataddo is deeply committed to a no-code philosophy. So even if your data team is small, inexperienced or simply non-existent, we are confident that even less technically-oriented staff will be quickly able to learn how to use Dataddo, thus reducing your need for a large number of hard-to-get and harder-to-train data personnel.

Frictionless reporting is the name of the game. Dataddo is proud to be one of its key players.

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data strategy

Integrate Any Data With Google Data Studio

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Struggling with getting all of your data to one dashboard?

Google Data Studio (GDS) is beside Power BI and Tableau as one of the most popular data visualization tools on the market today. The main focus of GDS is data visualization and Google strives for simplicity, but creating dashboards is just the final piece of your data management puzzle. Before that, you have to solve the data preparation piece and that’s often the tricky part.

GDS offers a set of data connectors that includes both Google’s services and third-party connectors. Even with the existing connectors to various services, you might need to pull data from a proprietary CRM or less common services. If you don’t have the right consolidated data inputs, the generation of your business intelligence reports can become a time-consuming nightmare. GDS offers a data blending feature, however many users feel this feature is under-developed and unreliable.

To bypass these limitations, many companies choose to build out custom connectors for their data. They hire a developer either in-house or on contract to build their custom data pipelines. This may be a feasible solution, but it’s likely not the most efficient as there are many issues you will likely come across sooner or later. First of all, there’s time-consuming maintenance involved since you’ll likely need to stray from your initial data pipeline configuration. Once your data needs change, your system may be left out-of-date and you’ll need to reconfigure the entire data pipeline which can involve costly and time-consuming development. Custom data connector development also comes without comprehensive monitoring, meaning once one of your data source APIs updates, which for some services is quite often, you likely won’t find out about any issues until the data flow is already broken. Another concern is that employees and contractors come and go and if the person who was tasked with building custom pipelines leaves, you’ll need to transfer the responsibility of the system to a new developer who likely has no knowledge about your system.

So how can your organization maintain a system of sustainable data management? The best way to simplify your organization’s data journey, easily manipulate the data structure on-the-fly and seamlessly create complex reports without the need for external developers and additional costs is to use reliable, secure and user-friendly data management tool like Dataddo.

Many efficient companies today are utilizing managed services with easy to use interfaces, built-in proactive monitoring, and ultra-flexible architecture. Tools like this allow organizations to easily add new data connectors to create data sources or switch data output from one BI tool to another as business needs change.

Perhaps the most significant value gained by utilizing a tool like this is having one single point for all data management which makes your processes much more organized and frictionless, saving you time and money.

Dataddo can connect all of your data sources with your BI tools or dashboarding apps like Google Data Studio or even your data storage solutions so you can manage all of your data from one place without writing a single line of code.

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data strategy

Integrate Any Data With Power BI

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Does your data management strategy work for the 21st century?

Power BI is beside Google Data Studio and Tableau as one of the most popular data visualization tools on the market today. This has been the case in 2019 and Microsoft is sure to have the tool on the list of top 10 software players in the segment in 2020 as well.

The main focus of Power BI is data visualization, but creating visualizations is just one small piece of your data management puzzle. Before you get to composing complex dashboards, there is a significant process involved to properly get your data to pass through, so creating the dashboard itself just the tip of the iceberg. The trickiest part of the data management process is data preparation. If you don’t have the right data inputs, the generation of your business intelligence reports can become a time-consuming nightmare. So what issues might you come across when working with dashboarding apps and how can you easily navigate them?

Many companies have chosen to build out custom connectors for their data. They hire a developer either in-house or on contract to build their custom data pipelines. This may be a solution, but it’s likely not the best as there are lots of issues you will likely come across sooner or later. For example, there is problematic maintenance since you’ll likely need to stray from your initial data pipeline configuration. Once your data needs change, your system can be left out-of-date and you’ll need to reconfigure the entire data pipeline which can involve costly and time-consuming development. Custom data connector development also comes without comprehensive monitoring, meaning once one of your data source APIs updates, which for some services is quite often, you likely won’t find out about issues until the data flow is already broken. Another concern is that employees and contractors come and go and if the person who was tasked with building custom pipelines leaves, you’ll need to transfer the responsibility of the system to a new developer who likely has no knowledge about your system.

So how can your organization maintain a system of sustainable data management? The best way to simplify your organization’s data journey, easily manipulate the data structure on-the-fly and seamlessly create complex reports without the need for external developers and additional costs is to use reliable, secure and user-friendly data management tool. Many efficient companies today are utilizing managed services with easy to use interfaces, built-in proactive monitoring, and ultra-flexible architecture. Tools like this allow organizations to easily add new data connectors to create data sources or switch data output from one BI tool to another as business needs change.

Perhaps the most significant value gained by utilizing a tool like this is having one single point for all data management which makes your processes much more organized and frictionless, saving you time and money. Dataddo can connect all of your data sources with your BI tools or dashboarding apps like PowerBI or even your data storage solution so you can manage all of your data from one place without writing a single line of code.

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data strategy

Integrate Any Data With Tableau

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

It’s not just about creating dashboards!

Tableau stands beside Google Data Studio and Power BI on the list of the most popular data visualization tools on the market.  The platform is one of the top 10 software players in this segment in the last few years.

The main focus of Tableau is easy data visualization and the tool makes it simple to create beautiful dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface. The tricky part tends to come in the beginning when users need to deal with setting up data inputs. Even though we tend to simply focus on data visualization, this is only the final part of your data management process. Without an efficient routine to handle data inputs, the generation of your reports can become a time-consuming nightmare.

One of the biggest trouble makers can be a custom-built data pipelines. Why? Because they require hiring a developer who builds your data pipelines which tend to be one-time solutions, hardly adaptable to your changing needs. Once your needs change, your system is suddenly rendered out-of-date and you’ll need to rebuild the whole pipeline with additional costs and wasted time. Another aspect is that many APIs are updated quite often and with the absence of comprehensive development, your data inputs can stop working properly. There is also the issue of maintenance and if your developer leaves the company, you must transfer the responsibility to a new party since all of his knowledge about the system is gone you’re forced to start the process over from the ground up.

So how can you build your company’s data management processes on stable foundations?

In order to simplify your data journey and easily change the current data structure of your inputs without the need for external developers and additional costs, you can use a reliable, secure and user-friendly data integration platform. A clear new trend is the use of a managed service with up-to-date interfaces, built-in proactive monitoring, and flexible architecture. With such a tool, once your needs change you can easily add a new data source, reconfigure data structures and setup all of your data outputs using a friendly user interface. On the data destination side, you can also easily switch from one BI tool or data warehouse to another. The crucial value is that you can manage all your processes from one place via one platform – a single place for your data management. Having everything managed with one tool makes the entire process much more organized and frictionless. Dataddo can connect all of your data sources with your BI tools, dashboarding apps and data storage solutions and you don’t need to write a single line of code.  

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data strategy

How to integrate Exact Online data with your dashboarding apps

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Need to integrate your Exact Online with Tableau, Google Data Studio,
Power BI or other BI tools? It’s easy with Dataddo!

Exact Online is a powerful software that automates accounting, financial, ERP, HRM, and CRM related processes. The platform is very popular, especially in the Benelux area.  While Exact is a very complex and highly customizable software, platforms like this can often cause further data-related headaches for organizations. Sometimes you might need to combine data from Exact with data from other BI data sources, or you might need to visualize the data from Exact in dashboarding tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Power BI and others. As the software is highly customizable, it can also prove to be tricky to connect to other systems. This makes the task of getting all data consolidated into dashboards or other platforms a very daunting proposition.

In most cases, setting up data pipelines isn’t just a one time task and you might need to extract and integrate your data for other purposes like setting up weekly or monthly reports.  

Setting these pipelines up manually can take days or even weeks of custom coding and development, only to be revisited down the road when one of your tools has an API update. You have a few options: you can hire an in-house team that’s dedicated to data governance, sub out a software engineer who develops custom pipelines and bills you for maintenance and updates, or   you can use a universal data integration pipeline like Dataddo, which covers all of your potential data issues at a fraction of the cost. 

Dataddo, a no-code data integration platform is able to easily connect Exact Online and any other data sources to various data destinations. Dataddo can easily adapt to variable customized platform environments. Data from any system can be smoothly integrated and delivered to different BI tools for visualization with very little effort. Getting all of your data where it needs to go no longer requires all of the headaches with Dataddo.

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data strategy

HubSpot data reporting – an unsolvable problem?

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

HubSpot is one of the most popular marketing, sales, and customer service platforms used by thousands of companies in over 100 countries. Using tools like Hubspot and other cloud-based BI services has become a necessity for data-conscious businesses today. More and more companies are also turning to business intelligence tools like Tableau and Google Data Studio for reporting and creating dashboards to help visualize and better utilize their data. The problem is, it can be rather difficult to blend HubSpot data containing leads, analytics, sales or customer service information with data from other sources within BI tools for visualization and reporting.

One of HubSpot’s key features is the ability for users to customize the platform to perfectly meet their company’s needs. Unfortunately, there are some headaches that come along with the highly customizable data that the platform can provide. High customizability makes the Hubspot platform quite difficult to connect to other BI services and tools like Tableau, GDS and others. These services often require extra work when trying to create consolidated reports containing both Hubspot data and data from other analytics or project management services.

The solution is Dataddo, our no-code data integration platform able to easily connect HubSpot and any other data sources to your various data destinations. Thanks to our robust data transformation engine, organizations can easily adapt to variable customized platform environments. Data from virtually any system can be easily integrated and delivered where it needs to go without writing a line of code, so setting up data pipelines doesn’t need to be a pain point any longer.

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Uncategorized

CRA & Dataddo to Offer IoT Data Processing Platform

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Ceske Radiokomunikace (CRA) is a provider of television, radio and internet infrastructure. CRA announced that they’re entering the business intelligence and big data market segments as part of their IoT services offering in cooperation with Dataddo.

CRA now offers a solution to connect IoT infrastructure and the CRA cloud with the integration of Dataddo. The solution provides data encoding, decoding, transformation and delivery.

The Dataddo platform processes data from LoRaWAN devices transmitted by the CRA network and transforms the datasets into formats digestible by BI tools and Big Data storage platforms. This allows customers to easily tie this new type of IoT data into their existing IT stack very quickly without extensive engineering tasks.

Dataddo is a cloud-based data integration, automation and transformation platform designed to work with almost any online data service such as CRMs, analytics platforms, ERPs, or project management tools. Thanks to a robust automation and data transformation infrastructure, Dataddo can transform and wire the data to a wide range of databases, DWHs, cloud storages, dashboarding and BI applications allowing for smooth interoperability with existing IT and BI stacks.

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