css/excel/datastudio?

[Nearthemark]

Hi,

 

I'm wanting to share data with others, but want to be able to control who can see what. For example, school level data whereby curriculum leaders can see their data but senior leaders have a higher level of access, or trust level data where schools see their info but the trust sees more. I'm competent with Excel, but can only do this by password protecting sheets which is not particularly secure. I want to be able to share information very clearly and graphically.

 

I was wondering what people on here thought the best route was to share data graphically, securely, and with different levels of access. Do I need to learn how to use css or something behind a website, or is google data studio a good solution, or something else entirely?

 

Many thanks,

 

 

Mark

[RootsSchImp]

Hi Mark,

 

You can do this with Row Level Security in Power BI but the people you're sharing with need Power BI Pro licences so there's a cost (around £20 per year/per user I believe).

 

Not sure if Google Data Studio can do this - I'd be very interested to hear if anyone's done wiht that or any other free tool

 

Good luck, Ed

[dhicks]

I was wondering what people on here thought the best route was to share data graphically, securely, and with different levels of access. Do I need to learn how to use css or something behind a website, or is google data studio a good solution, or something else entirely?

 

What set(s) of people do you need to be able to grant access to, and what access / control do you have over their account details? I'm guessing you're starting with "all staff" at your school or similar, with a smaller set of "all senior management", but possibly with further groups such as "trust-wide senior managers" and, possibly at some point, "parents".

 

For a single domain (your school), where you know everyone has a login of some sort (probably either Google or Microsoft), a Google Sites / Sharepoint site might work. For Google Sites, you can embed a document preview in a web page, so you can build up a "dashboard" type view of various different documents, with each document having relevant access rights handled by Google Workspace. I've not tried with O365 / Sharepoint, but I'd guess it's possible to do something similar.

 

I'm currently working on a platform that allows a similar setup to the above but with authentication from multiple sources (Google, Microsoft, plain email).

 

Do I need to learn how to use css or something behind a website

 

CSS is used for the front-end formatting of web pages. I think I can see what you're thinking - you want to get some data as a CSV table and have it neatly formatted in some way on a web page. I would go for a back-end approach for this - use a package that can suck in data from wherever you have it (MIS, or possibly a bunch of Excel files stuck on Google Drive or Onedrive) and output a bunch of tables / charts / etc, possibly as HTML / CSS web pages, or possibly as PNG images / SVG images / PDF documents / etc. I would use Python for that, it has a good selection of libraries available for handling large datasets and outputting tables / charts, but plenty of other packages / languages are available.

[Nearthemark]

Thanks David, that's really helpful. Your assumptions on "who" is correct.

 

Google sites may be a good solution, I've not used this before (or workspace) - presumably this is a secure way of holding the data?

[dhicks]

Google sites may be a good solution, I've not used this before (or workspace) - presumably this is a secure way of holding the data?

 

Google Workspace: what Google are now calling what they used to call GSuite - the combination of Drive / Docs / Sheets / etc, with access controlled via a single login.

 

On Google Drive, you can set access rights for individual files to particular users / groups, so you could have a folder in Drive where you stick any images / PDFs / spreadsheets, and only people who have access rights to that folder will be able to get to them. All users you require to have access will need to have a Google account (unless you make files public), although not necessarily on your domain. Most files (except, annoyingly, HTML files) on Google Drive can be viewed in "preview" mode, with that "preview" mode view being embeddable in a web page (a Google Sites website, or any web page really).

 

I imagine the above paragraph holds for Microsoft, switching "Google Drive" for OneDrive, Google account for Microsoft account and Google Sites for Sharepoint.

[Moomin1974]

A Power BI Pro licence costs around £8 per month per user. You could use Power BI embedded, in which case per-user licensing is not necessary (you just need a pro licence for one person). However, I don't think RLS would work in that case because each user would not be identifiable. On the plus side, report consumers could be external and would not require a O365 account.

[NotSoFast]

Google Data Studio is free and would work. I've used it for dashboards open to all members of the "Staff" group at school, but if you wanted different levels of access there are two alternatives. You can use row level security (although I never have) or just make different dashboards for different user groups. I looked at Power BI but we're a Google school and there's no benefit as far as I can see in paying the £1.70 per month per user for access.

[Nearthemark]

Google Data Studio is free and would work. I've used it for dashboards open to all members of the "Staff" group at school, but if you wanted different levels of access there are two alternatives. You can use row level security (although I never have) or just make different dashboards for different user groups. I looked at Power BI but we're a Google school and there's no benefit as far as I can see in paying the £1.70 per month per user for access.

 

Thank you, that's encouraging to hear. I may have to make multiple dashboards but presumably you can duplicate them, and then point new ones to a new google sheet, which itself is copied from a template and taking info from the main dataset but filtered (probably with vlookup) to give just data for that school.

 

I'm now about to start in datastudio....