Introduction to analysis and business intelligence tools

When you use a data platform like BigQuery, analysis and business intelligence tools are crucial to helping you discover insights from your data. This document presents several Google and third-party tools that complement and integrate with BigQuery.

Connected Sheets lets you access, analyze, visualize, and share billions of rows of BigQuery data from your Google Sheets spreadsheets. The Connected Sheets interface simplifies collaboration with non-technical project stakeholders, requires no additional data exports, streamlines reporting, and provides powerful access control capabilities.

Looker is Google's enterprise platform for data visualization and business intelligence. It is useful for advanced data analytics, predictive analysis, and custom data applications. It can also connect to transactional databases in other public clouds.

Looker Studio is a Google tool for data visualization and business intelligence. It connects to BigQuery directly from the Google Cloud console and is useful for building simple graphics, reports, and dashboards.

ODBC and JDBC drivers let you combine the power of BigQuery with your existing tooling and infrastructure that use popular ODBC or JDBC connections.

Programmatic analysis tools can run code to analyze data managed in BigQuery. While SQL is a powerful query language, Python, Java, or R often provide a more simplified, expressive way to perform data analysis. Such tools include open source web-based applications like Jupyter Notebooks and Apache Zeppelin, as well as platforms for statistical application development like RStudio. Vertex AI Workbench is a Google tool that offers JupyterLab notebook environments for programmatic analysis.

You can also connect to BigQuery using a number of popular third-party tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. The BigQuery Ready program offers a full list of validated partner solutions.

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