Create Engaging Amazon QuickSight Dashboards with Enhanced Table and Pivot Table Features

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Date: November 12, 2021

Category: Amazon QuickSight, Announcements

Amazon QuickSight is a robust, cloud-driven business intelligence (BI) service that simplifies the process of generating and sharing insights across your organization without requiring any servers or infrastructure. QuickSight dashboards can also be seamlessly embedded into applications and portals, enabling insights to reach external stakeholders. Additionally, QuickSight Q allows end-users to pose questions in natural language and receive machine learning (ML)-enhanced visual answers.

Within QuickSight, tables and pivot tables are among the most frequently utilized visuals, often featured prominently in dashboards. These visuals enable data to be displayed clearly and understandably, with functionalities such as filtering, conditional formatting, and cross-visual actions, all while being scalable to millions of rows of data. This data can be directly queried from various data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, or QuickSight’s SPICE data store. By leveraging QuickSight’s new Free form layout, you can present pixel-perfect data views to your stakeholders.

We have recently introduced eight new features that allow for extensive customization of tables and pivot tables in QuickSight to suit your presentation needs, including:

• Customizable row heights
• Vertical alignment of cell content
• Text wrapping capabilities
• Background and font color options
• Borders and gridline adjustments
• The ability to insert images in table cells
• Hyperlinks within table cells
• Customized styling for totals and subtotals

In this article, we will delve into how you, as creators of QuickSight dashboards, can enhance your tables and pivot tables using these exciting new features.

Leverage Styling Options for Improved Data Presentation

These updates enable you to design tables that align with specific design patterns or corporate branding. For instance, if you want to create a table visual featuring a selection of videos, including view and vote counts, along with links to each video, it is crucial to adhere to your organization’s color palette, select appropriate line heights, apply a consistent grid style, and display thumbnail images of the correct size. You can achieve all this through the newly launched table styling options, accessible via the format visual panel.

To customize the background color, row height, and text color in table headers:

1. In the Format visual pane, select Headers.
2. For Background, click on the background color icon and choose your desired color. You can select a provided color, reset to the default, or create a custom color.
3. For Row height, input a value in pixels ranging from 8 to 500.
4. To change the font color, click on the Abc color icon and select a color.

For customizing the background color, row height, text color, and text wrapping in table cells:

1. In the Format visual pane, choose Cells. The Cells section will expand to reveal customization options.
2. For Row height, enter a number in pixels between 8 and 500.
3. For Background, select alternating row colors, then choose a color for Odd and Even rows by clicking the background color icon for each.
4. To modify the font color, click on the Abc color icon and select a desired color.
5. To enable text wrapping in cells, check the Wrap text option and increase the Row height.

To display URLs as images:

1. In the Format visual menu, select Field styling.
2. In the Field styling pane, choose the field you want to style from the dropdown.
3. In the Url options section, select Show URLs as images.
4. After rendering images in a table, you can adjust their size in the Image sizing section of the Field style pane.

Custom Styling for Totals and Subtotals

In certain scenarios, particularly with financial data, it may be essential to style your totals and subtotals differently. Access these settings from the format visual panel.

To customize background color, font color, and borders for totals and subtotals:

1. In the Format visual pane, select Total or Subtotal.
2. For Background, click the background color icon and choose a color. You can select from the provided colors, revert to the default, or create a custom shade. In pivot tables, you can also add background colors for column totals and subtotals.
3. To change the font color, click on the Abc color icon and choose a color.
4. For Borders, customize the type by selecting a border type icon, adjusting thickness, and picking a border color.

To apply totals and subtotals styling to cells, select Apply styling to cells.

Here is an example of a pivot table formatted with some of the techniques mentioned above.

Sorting and Custom Actions

Combining the new formatting capabilities with QuickSight’s existing features unlocks numerous possibilities in your dashboards.

Custom Sorting

At times, you may need to organize fields beyond standard ascending or descending orders by dimension or measure. For instance, sorting days of the week or month names alphabetically or by any measure is not feasible. With the sorting options available for Table and Pivot tables (introduced in early 2021), you can now sort a field according to any other field in your dataset or a calculated field, whether it is in use or not.

To sort a field using an off-visual field:

1. Add the required fields.
2. Create a new calculated field using the rank function to rank the days of the week in your desired order.
3. Select the field containing the days of the week and choose Sort options:
• For Sort by, select the new calculated field from the dropdown.
• Since this field utilizes the rank function, it employs custom aggregation.
• Select Ascending and click Apply.

Now, the days of the week will be arranged as you intended. Note that you do not have to use a calculated field with the rank function; you can also use an existing field in your dataset that maintains the rank.

For more insights on enhancing your QuickSight experience, check out another informative blog post here. For authoritative guidance on this topic, visit this resource. Additionally, if you’re interested in learning how Amazon trains its associates, this link provides excellent information.

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