New row and column interactivity options for tables and pivot tables in Amazon QuickSight – Part 1

Amazon QuickSight is a fully-managed, cloud-native business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to create and deliver insights to everyone in your organization. You can make your data come to life with rich interactive charts and create beautiful dashboards to share with thousands of users, either directly within a QuickSight application, or embedded in web apps and portals.

In 2021, as part of table and pivot table customization, we launched the ability for authors to resize row height in tables and pivot tables. Now, we are extending this capability to readers, along with other row and column interactions, such as altering column width and header height for both tables and pivot tables using a drag handler, for consistency between row and column interactions and an improved user experience. Apart from the format pane settings, authors can make quick changes to column, row, and header width for both parent and child nodes by simply dragging the cell, column, or row to the desired setting using the drag handler.

The following are the different interactions that both readers and authors can perform, some of which were already available for tables.

Modify row height

You can modify row height using the drag handler for cells, row headers, or column headers.

The following screenshot illustrates how to alter the row height by dragging from any cell in the table or pivot table.

For row headers, you can only resize row height by dragging the last element (child node), which gets aggregated to define the row height for the parent node.

You can resize the height of the column headers at any level such that you can have different heights at each level for better aesthetics.

Modify column width

You can also use the drag handler to modify column width for row headers, column headers, or cells.

You can alter column width for any field assigned to rows, as shown in the following screenshot.

You can alter column width for column dimension members both from the parent or leaf node in the case of hierarchy, or column field or values headers in the absence of a column hierarchy.

You now have complete flexibility to resize column width from cells. Depending on which cell, the corresponding column width is adjusted.

Considerations

A few things to note about this new feature:

• Drag handlers are available for both web and embedded use cases
• Row height is set in common for all rows and not specific to a particular row

Summary

With the introduction of a drag handler, authors and readers can now quickly alter column width, row height, and header height for tables and pivot tables. This provides a consistent behavior and improved user interaction for both the personas and visuals. To learn more about table and pivot table formatting options, refer to Formatting tables and pivot tables in Amazon QuickSight.

Try out the new feature and share your feedback and questions in the comments section.

About the author

Bhupinder Chadha is a senior product manager for Amazon QuickSight focused on visualization and front end experiences. He is passionate about BI, data visualization and low-code/no-code experiences. Prior to QuickSight he was the lead product manager for Inforiver, responsible for building a enterprise BI product from ground up. Bhupinder started his career in presales, followed by a small gig in consulting and then PM for xViz, an add on visualization product.