Amazon QuickSight User Guide

Why QuickSight?

What is Amazon QuickSight?

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Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service that you can use to deliver easy-to-
understand insights to the people who you work with, wherever they are. Amazon QuickSight connects
to your data in the cloud and combines data from many different sources. In a single data dashboard,
QuickSight can include AWS data, third-party data, big data, spreadsheet data, SaaS data, B2B data, and
more. As a fully managed cloud-based service, Amazon QuickSight provides enterprise-grade security,
global availability, and built-in redundancy. It also provides the user-management tools that you need to
scale from 10 users to 10,000, all with no infrastructure to deploy or manage.

QuickSight gives decision-makers the opportunity to explore and interpret information in an interactive
visual environment. They have secure access to dashboards from any device on your network and from
mobile devices.

To learn more about the major components and processes of Amazon QuickSight and the typical
workflow for creating data visualizations, see the following sections. Get started today to unlock the
potential of your data and make the best decisions that you can.

Topics
• Why QuickSight? (p. 1)
• Starting work with QuickSight (p. 2)

Why QuickSight?
Every day, the people in your organization make decisions that affect your business. When they have
the right information at the right time, they can make the choices that move your company in the right
direction.

Here are some of the benefits of using Amazon QuickSight for analytics, data visualization, and
reporting:

• The in-memory engine, called SPICE, responds with blazing speed.

• No upfront costs for licenses and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Collaborative analytics with no need to install an application.
• Combine a variety of data into one analysis.
• Publish and share your analysis as a dashboard.
• Control features available in a dashboard.
• No need to manage granular database permissions—dashboard viewers can see only what you share.

For advanced users, QuickSight Enterprise edition offers even more features:

• Saves you time and money with automated and customizable data insights, powered by machine
learning (ML). This enables your organization to do the following, without requiring any knowledge of
machine learning:
• Automatically make reliable forecasts.

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 Amazon QuickSight User Guide
Starting work with QuickSight

• Automatically identify outliers.

• Find hidden trends.
• Act on key business drivers.
• Translate data into easy-to-read narratives, like headline tiles for your dashboard.
• Provides extra Enterprise security features, including the following:
• Federated users, groups, and single sign-on (IAM Identity Center) with AWS Identity and Access
Management (IAM) Federation, SAML, OpenID Connect, or AWS Directory Service for Microsoft
Active Directory.
• Granular permissions for AWS data access.
• Row level security.
• Highly secure data encryption at rest.
• Access to AWS data and on-premises data in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
• Offers pay-per-session pricing for the users that you place in the "reader" security role—readers are
dashboard subscribers, people who view reports but don't create them.
• Empowers you to make QuickSight part of your own websites and applications by deploying
embedded console analytics and dashboard sessions.
• Makes our business your business with multitenancy features for value-added resellers (VARs) of
analytical services.
• Enables you to programmatically script dashboard templates that can be transferred to other AWS
accounts.
• Simplifies access management and organization with shared and personal folders for analytical assets.
• Enables larger data import quotas for SPICE data ingestion and more frequently scheduled data
refreshes.

To learn more, see the following video, which contains a two-minute introduction to Amazon QuickSight:
Introducing Amazon QuickSight. The audio contains all of the relevant information.

To discover the power of end-to-end BI from AWS, sign up at https://aws.amazon.com/QuickSight.

Starting work with QuickSight

To start work with QuickSight, we recommend that you read the following sections:

• How Amazon QuickSight works (p. 3)– Learn essential terminology and how QuickSight
components work together.
• Getting started with Amazon QuickSight data analysis (p. 32) – Complete important setup tasks and
learn how to use a dashboard, create an analysis, and publish a dashboard.
• AWS security in Amazon QuickSight (p. 1121) – Understand how you can help to secure access to data
in QuickSight.

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 Amazon QuickSight User Guide
Terminology

How Amazon QuickSight works

Using Amazon QuickSight, you can access data and prepare it for use in reporting. It saves your prepared
data either in SPICE memory or as a direct query. You can use a variety of data sources for analysis. When
you create an analysis, the typical workflow looks like this:

1. Create a new analysis.

2. Add new or existing datasets.
3. Choose fields to create the first chart. QuickSight automatically suggests the best visualization.
4. Add more charts, tables, or insights to the analysis. Resize and rearrange them on one or more sheets.
Use extended features to add variables, custom controls, colors, additional pages (called sheets), and
more.
5. Publish the analysis as a dashboard to share it with other people.

The following illustration shows the basic workflow.

Terminology
Data preparation is the process of transforming data for use in an analysis. This includes making changes
like the following:

• Filtering out data so that you can focus on what's important to you.
• Renaming fields to make them easier to read.
• Changing data types so that they are more useful.
• Adding calculated fields to enhance analysis.
• Creating SQL queries to refine data.

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Using sample data

SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) is the robust in-memory engine that
QuickSight uses. SPICE is engineered to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. The
storage and processing capacity available in SPICE speeds up the analytical queries that you run against
your imported data. By using SPICE, you save time because you don't need to retrieve the data every
time that you change an analysis or update a visual.

A data analysis is the basic workspace for creating data visualizations, which are graphical
representations of your data. Each analysis contains a collection of visualizations that you arrange and
customize.

A data visualization, also known as a visual, is a graphical representation of data. There are many types
of visualizations, including diagrams, charts, graphs, and tables. All visuals begin in AutoGraph mode,
which automatically selects the best type of visualization for the fields that you select. You can also take
control and choose your own visuals. You can enhance your analytics by applying filters, changing colors,
adding parameter controls, custom click actions, and more.

Machine learning (ML) Insights propose narrative add-ons that are based on an evaluation of your data.
You can choose one from the list, for example forecasting or anomaly (outlier) detection. Or you can
create your own. You can combine insight calculations, narrative text, colors, images, and conditions that
you define.

A sheet is a page that displays a set of visualizations and insights. You can imagine this as a sheet from a
newspaper, except that it's filled with charts, graphs, tables, and insights. You can add more sheets, and
make them work separately or together in your analysis.

A dashboard is the published version of an analysis. You can share with other users of Amazon
QuickSight for reporting purposes. You specify who has access and what they can do with the dashboard.

Using sample data

To get a first look at how QuickSight works, you can explore Amazon QuickSight using the following
sample data:

• B2b sales data

• Business overview data (revenue)
• ML insights data
• People overview data (human resources)
• Sales pipeline data
• Web and social media analytics data (marketing)

Also, a variety of datasets are available free online that you can use with Amazon QuickSight, for
example the AWS public datasets. These datasets come in a variety of formats.

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Interacting with dashboards

Reader experience: Exploring

interactive dashboards in Amazon
QuickSight
Intended audience: Amazon QuickSight Dashboard subscribers or viewership

In Amazon QuickSight, a data dashboard is a collection of charts, graphs, and insights. It's like a
newspaper that's all about the data that you're interested in, except it has digital pages. Instead of
reading it, you interact with it.

Dashboards come in a wide variety of designs, depending on what you do and the analytics that you
need to do it well. Using QuickSight, you can interact with your data on a webpage or your mobile
device. If you also subscribe by mail, you can see a static preview of it.

The story told by your data reflects the expertise of the analysts and data scientists who built the
dashboards. They refine the data, add calculations, find angles on the story, and decide how to present
it. The publisher designs the dashboard and fills it with interactive data visualizations and controls that
adjust your view. Publishers can customize the level of interactivity that you have, including filter and
search options. You can interact with the active items on the screen to filter, sort, drill down, or jump to
another tool.

When you view a dashboard, you're seeing the most recently received data. As you interact with the
items on the screen, any changes you make change your view of the dashboard, and no one else's. Thus,
your device's privacy is assured, although the publisher can tell what you looked at. After you close the
dashboard, your explorations aren't preserved and neither is the data. As always, while you're an Amazon
QuickSight reader, your monthly subscription is provided by the publishers of the dashboards at no
additional cost to you.

If you're also a dashboard publisher—we call them authors, because they write reports—you can also
save a copy of the dashboard for further analysis. If you find a new feature of the data that you want to
publish, work with the original authors to update it. That way, everyone can see the same version of the
story. However, you can also use your copy to learn how their design works or to inspire your work on
something entirely new. Then, when you're finished, you can publish your analysis as a new dashboard.

To learn to set up dashboards, see Sharing and subscribing to data in Amazon QuickSight (p. 879).

Topics
• Interacting with Amazon QuickSight dashboards (p. 5)
• Interacting with paginated reports in Amazon QuickSight (p. 19)
• Subscribing to dashboard emails and alerts (p. 22)
• Bookmarking views of a dashboard (p. 23)

Interacting with Amazon QuickSight dashboards

To access a dashboard that you've been invited to share, follow the instructions in the invitation email.
You can also access a dashboard if it's embedded into an application or website that you already have
access to. When you open the dashboard, the screen should look something like the following example.