Amazon QuickSight Spring Announcement: KPI Charts, Export to CSV, AD Connector, and More!

Today I’m excited to share with you a number of exciting new features and enhancements in Amazon QuickSight. You can now create key performance indicator (KPI) charts, define custom ranges when importing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, export data to comma separated value (CSV) format, and create aggregate filters for SPICE data sets. In the Enterprise Edition, we added an additional option to connect to your on-premises Active Directory using AD Connector.

KPI charts

With KPI charts, you can present a single aggregated value from a measure, and also comparisons against another measure or over a time period. These values are ideal for building dashboards and surfacing key business metrics. For example, the following KPI chart shows the sales of the current month and the difference compared to the previous month.

To get started with this new chart type, simply select a measure and QuickSight’s AutoGraph capability automatically generates a KPI chart based on the measure. You can then choose to add another measure for a target value, or a dimension for the trend group to add comparisons. Alternatively, you can select the KPI chart type icon on the Visual Types panel to create the chart manually. 

Custom ranges for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets

In this release, we also added some enhancements to our Microsoft Excel support. When you upload an Excel spreadsheet, QuickSight now automatically detects the cell range of your table in the sheet. This approach makes it even easier to analyze your Excel data. Also, if you have a specific area in the sheet that you want to focus on, you can now define a custom range in QuickSight. 

Export to CSV

One of the most frequent feature requests we receive from customers is the ability to export visualizations in CSV format. This export format makes it possible for insights derived in QuickSight to be consumed by other means. You can now export your data to CSV by selecting the visual you want to export, clicking on the top-right menu icon, and choosing Export to CSV. 

Aggregate filters for SPICE data sets

With aggregate filters for SPICE data sets, you can now define filter conditions after aggregations have been applied on a metric. For example, in the Business Review sample analysis, you can now filter on customers who have been billed more than $2 million, in total, over time.

AD Connector

With the announcement of Enterprise Edition last December, we added support for user authentication using AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD). This support allows you to provision and authenticate your users by connecting to an AWS hosted Microsoft AD, or a trusted on-premises AD. Using Managed Microsoft AD, you can easily provision users across multiple cloud and on-premises domains using trust relationships provisioned with the respective ADs.

With this new announcement, we are adding an additional option to connect QuickSight to your on-premises AD using AD Connector. AD Connector doesn’t require provisioning and maintenance of trust relationships with ADs. Instead, AD Connector acts as a proxy that forwards sign-in requests to your on-premises AD for validation. As with Managed Microsoft AD, users log in to QuickSight using their existing AD credentials. Security policies related to password expiration, password history, RADIUS-based multifactor authentication (MFA), and account lockouts are enforced by the AD as usual. QuickSight Enterprise Edition supports the AD Connector in US East (N. Virginia). You have the option to provision SPICE capacity in all supported regions. 

Learn more

To learn more about these capabilities and start using them in your dashboards, check out the QuickSight User Guide.

Stay engaged

If you have questions and suggestions, you can post them on the QuickSight Discussion Forum.

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