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There are two basic layout modes in QuickSight:
The “Snap-to” Canvas that is good for fast, clean Dashboard creation. It snaps all Visuals into place automatically. Custom will allow you to:
All visual types except pivot tables offer the ability to create a hierarchy of fields to add drill-downs to visual elements. To create a drill-down level Click visual -> Field Wells -> Drag a field to Field Wells and make sure it says “Add Drill-down layer.” You’ll notice the field active has a filled-in color while the drill-down fields are white:
Lear more about Drill-downs here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksight/latest/user/adding-drill-downs.html
Or watch the video below:
Calculated fields are additional capabilities allowing a user to create new insights from existing data fields. To add a calculated field in your analysis, choose Add at top left, and then choose Add calculated field.
In the calculations editor that opens, do the following:
Once a dataset has been uploaded:
1. In the edit/preview data page, click ‘Add data’.
2. A pop-up window appears with the options to select a datasource, dataset, or upload a new dataset to join with the current dataset.
3. After the dataset has been added, use the two circles (see below) to configure the join. In the join configuration section, you can select the join type (inner, left, right, or full) and also select the columns in each dataset that will be used to join the datasets.
4.Select the type of join and respective columns (see below).
5. Hit Apply to create a new joined dataset.
SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) is the robust in-memory engine that Amazon QuickSight uses. It’s engineered to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. If the data is not imported through SQL, the data would be transformed into SPICE format.
In QuickSight, datasets can be edited in the Datasets page or directly from the Analysis:
1. In the Datasets page, select a dataset and click ‘Edit dataset’ in the pop-up window.
2. In the Analysis, click pencil icon next to the ‘Datasets’ at the top left corner. Edit a dataset by clicking on the three dots next to a selected dataset.
QuickSight supports dataset transformations such as field renaming, changing data types, excluding unneeded fields, and data filtering based on a rule.
In the Analysis:
1.Click ‘Add’ -> ‘Add Calculated Field’.
2.Add name that would describe a calculated field.
3.Type ‘sum()’ and select a column that you would like to sum.
4.Hit ‘Save’. You will now be able to see the calculation in the field list.
There are three main ways to style QuickSight visuals:
In the Format visual window, users can edit visual titles, hide or rename fields, add data labels, fit tables to view, collapse and expand icons.
Use the left nav “Themes” feature to change the Tab backgrounds and set the color themes in QuickSight. Cruz Street Analyst Stephanie Zhao explains:
QuickSight and Tableau are both great data visualization (Dashboarding) products. QuickSight was launched by AWS in 2015 and Tableau was founded in California in 2003 and acquired by Salesforce in 2019. As it was founded earlier, Tableau has an installed software heritage and only more recently develop cloud versions of the product. QuickSight is a cloud-native solution without the necessity of a desktop app.
Differentiators
QuickSight: Super-fast in-memory data storage and calculation engine called SPICE; Lower, usage-based pricing; Fully-SaaS so that data does not need to be managed on desktop applications making it more secure.
Tableau: Well-established in market; Leading UI tools for designing beautiful visualizations.
Pricing
QuickSight:
Tableau:
Get more details in our blog post comparing Tableau to QuickSight.
Both are great. We wrote a blog post comparing their strengths and weaknesses here.
