Google LLC today announced the graduation of two more cloud services from beta. As of today, Google Data Studio, a free business intelligence tool, and Cloud Dataprep, which is used to prepare data for analysis, are generally available.

Data Studio has actually been around since May 2016. When it was launched in preview, Google said the idea was to make visual analytics more accessible. Data Studio does this by providing a way to access and analyze data from Google cloud data sources like BigQuery, Sheets, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Storage, as well as its marketing platforms Google Analytics, YouTube Analytics and Google Ads. It can also access more than 500 outside data sources via more than 100 partner-built connectors.

Using Data Studio then, it’s possible to visualize and explore data via dashboards and reports from pretty much any common source and share the insights it provides with colleagues.

Data Studio now boasts more than 1 million users around the world, and now Google is adding new features in order to address some of the common demands it has received. The new features include Data Studio Explorer, which is an “ad-hoc data exploration component” that integrates directly with the Google BigQuery service and can transform entire datasets into a visualization in just a few clicks:

A second new feature makes it easy to blend data from disparate sources into a single chart, as the next graphic illustrates:

Google has also created a customized report template gallery to help new users get started with Data Studioand in a few weeks will launch a new community feature that supports custom visualizations.

As for Cloud Dataprep, it was launched at Google’s Cloud Next conference in San Francisco in May 2017. As the name suggests, it’s a data preparation tool that’s used to divine various kinds of data and prepare them to be readable for machine learning or other data analytics workloads. Google said at the time this was an important capability, because more than 75 percent of the time it takes to do analytics is spent on preparing data.

“We introduced Google Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta to make data preparation easy, fast and powerful through an intuitive and serverless visual interface,” Google said today.

Just like Data Studio, Cloud Dataprep hits general availability with a number of new features that were requested by beta users that should help with exploring, cleaning and enriching data. They include a new and simpler user interface, the ability for teams to collaborate on data preparation by sharing flows and more tools aimed at business analysts such as “Google Sheets-like pivots and unions, improved source:target schema matching and parameter-based dataset processing.”

Images: Google