When you use ImportData, ImportJSON, BigQuery or any other method to get CSV, JSON or Database data into Google Sheets, you often end up with what can be described as a "data dump". To illustrate this, take the following example of someone’s running data from a Fitbit:

Building visualizations from data dumps isn’t straightforward, so we recommend creating a new sheet to analyze the data and get the metrics that you need.

For example, from the above sheet you might want to see how many times you’ve run in each City, or how many times you’ve gone for morning, afternoon, evening, or night runs, etc. This is possible by using formulas such as UNIQUE, COUNTIF and other Statistical and Maths functions.

Here’s a new "Analysis for Geckoboard" sheet with a series of calculations from the original sheet. For reference, you can this and the above sheet mentioned in this article here.

When you’ve added the calculations you need in the new sheet, you can connect your Spreadsheet to Geckoboard and build visualizations like these:

Tip: You can also manipulate your "data dump" data using Pivot Tables. If you do so please take this advice into consideration.