Empower business users with prompted reports and reader scheduling in Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, machine learning (ML)-powered business intelligence (BI) solution. As a fully managed service, QuickSight lets you create and publish interactive dashboards. In addition to dashboards, QuickSight provides Pixel-perfect Reports for the creation and sharing of highly formatted, personalized reports containing business-critical data to hundreds of thousands of end-users without any infrastructure setup or maintenance, up-front licensing, or long-term commitments. To learn more, see What is Pixel-perfect Reporting in QuickSight Learning Series video.

In this post, you will learn how prompted reports and reader scheduling can empower business users to accelerate information gathering in QuickSight. Pixel-perfect reports are suitable for business users who need highly formatted reports on a regular basis. For instance, financial analysts need to have monthly reports to review sales performance of last month. QuickSight dashboard owners or co-owners can set up a schedule to email a pixel-perfect report to dashboard viewers such as financial analysts on a regular basis. Dashboard viewers can view reports, but they can’t change the filtering condition or set up a new email schedule in pixel-perfect reports. In the following example, prior to these new features, a viewer would need to request the dashboard owner to create a new report, change the date filter to show the previous week and add a new weekly schedule. The financial analyst might need to raise a request and wait for the owner to set up the schedule. This process might take days or weeks depending on the owner’s availability. See Granting individual Amazon QuickSight users and groups access to a dashboard in Amazon QuickSight to understand more about owners, co-owners, and viewers.

To accelerate the process and empower business users, QuickSight has announced two new features, prompted reports and reader scheduling. Prompted reports allows owners and co-owners to create filter controls in a pixel-perfect report. Dashboard users, including owners, co-owners, and viewers can use the pre-defined filters to select specific values and generate customized pixel-perfect reports; for example, they can modify the date filter from last month to last week. Reader scheduling allows viewers to create their own email report schedule in a pixel-perfect report. In this post, we will describe how to configure prompted report and reader scheduling in QuickSight.

Prompted report

The following screenshot shows an example of a prompted report—a sales performance report that was created to show the sales performance of the previous month. The default date filter was configured to the previous month by the dashboard owner.

As shown in the following video, with a prompted report, any user with access to the dashboard can change the filter. In this example, the Order Date has been updated to Previous Week and the region filter has been changed to EMEA. Then the user can choose RUN NOW to generate the report.

After the dashboard user has chosen RUN NOW, the report will be generated. The dashboard will show the message Preparing file for download, as shown in the following figure, while the report is generating. After the report has been generated, it will be available for download.

In the example report shown in the following figure, the filters on date range and the region dimensions have been updated according to the filters applied in the prompted report. Data such as sales amount, region, and subregion has been updated.

The dashboard owner or co-owner can use the following steps to set up a prompted report.

1. To set up a prompted report, you need to go to the pixel-perfect report and add a filter control.
2. Choose any one of the visual in the report, click filter icon. Then choose ADD to add a filter and select the field you want to filter on. In this example, I have added a filter on order date to show the data of previous month. And applied this filter to all visuals in this report.
3. Add a control of the filter in the report, so that user can change the filter value when they viewing the report.
   
4. You can follow the same steps to add other filters such as region, subregion, etc.
   
5. Finally, you can publish the report so that users can start using the prompted report.
   

Reader scheduling

In addition to prompted reports, QuickSight is also launching reader scheduling. Before the launch of reader scheduling, if viewers tried to schedule a report, they would see the message shown in the following figure, prompting them to ask the dashboard owner or co-owner to create a schedule for them.

In the following figure, the dashboard owner has created a schedule to send a report to all users who have access to the dashboard.

Because the report has been scheduled to be sent to all users, all viewers can see that they are subscribed to the report schedule in the dashboard and can unsubscribe if they don’t want to receive it. For more details, see Subscribing to email reports in Amazon QuickSight.

With the launch of the reader scheduling feature, viewers are empowered to create their own report schedule. In the following example, a viewer has changed the filter of the prompted report to the previous week and the EMEA region. Viewers can now add a new schedule to receive the report weekly. Each viewer can define up to five schedules. Viewers can only schedule emailing of reports to themselves and they cannot create schedules for owners, co-owners, or other viewers.

Viewers can use the following steps to set up reader scheduling.

1. In the QuickSight dashboard, choose Scheduling. Choose ADD and enter a schedule name. For Dashboard view, you can select Custom view or Original dashboard.
   • Custom view will pick up the filter value selected in the current view of the dashboard.
   • Original dashboard will pick up the filter value defined by the dashboard owner or co-owner when publishing the dashboard.
2. To receive a report that shows the previous week’s EMEA sales, which is different from the filter value defined by the dashboard owner, select Custom view.
   
3. Then choose the content, schedule, and email information such as subject, header, and body. And you can schedule to receive email of this report on a regular basis such as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. The report will start to run within one hour according to the scheduled time you defined. For example, if you have defined a report to run at 8:00 AM, it will start between 8:00 and 9:00 AM. Therefore, it’s recommended to schedule the report to run one hour ahead of when it’s needed.
   
4. After saving the new schedule, you can see it under the section My schedules. You can create up to five schedules. You can also see other report schedules created by the dashboard owner or co-owner under the section Shared with me. But you cannot see the schedules created by other viewers.
   
5. As an example, according to the schedule, on Monday morning you will receive an email containing the Previous Week report.
   

The following table summarizes the pixel-perfect report scheduling capability of dashboard owners, co-owners, and viewers.

(*) Dashboard owners or co-owners do not have a function to subscribe or unsubscribe from a report schedule. However, they can modify the report schedule to add or remove themselves from the email distribution list to achieve the same outcome.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve delved into two game-changing features in QuickSight Pixel-perfect Reports, prompted report and reader scheduling. These tools are transforming how business users access and receive reports that they’re interested in on their preferred schedule. We’ve illustrated a practical scenario that demonstrates the versatility of these features. With prompted reports, viewers can modify report filters to suit their specific needs. For instance, they might switch from viewing data for the previous month to the previous week; or focus on particular regions, subregions, or countries. The real magic happens when this customization is combined with reader scheduling. After viewers have tailored the report to their requirements, they can set up their own personalized scheduled report. This isn’t limited to just weekly updates—readers can choose any frequency that suits their needs, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or any custom schedule they require. By enabling this level of customization and autonomy, QuickSight is empowering business users to access precisely the insights they need through pixel-prefect reports, exactly when they need them. This not only reduces reliance on report authors but also accelerates decision-making processes across the organization, fostering a more agile, data-driven culture.

To learn more about prompted reports and reader scheduling, see Setting up prompts for pixel-perfect reports and Creating a reader generated report in Amazon QuickSight. You can also visit the QuickSight Community to ask and answer questions, connect with peers, and stay updated on the newest features and resources.

About the Author

Roy Yung is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight. Roy has over 10 years of experience implementing enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions. Prior to AWS, Roy delivered BI and data platform solutions in the insurance, banking, aviation, and retail industries.