Exploring interactive dashboards in Amazon QuickSight
Intended audience: Amazon QuickSight Dashboard subscribers or viewership
In Amazon QuickSight, a data dashboard is a collection of charts, graphs, and insights. It's like a newspaper that's all about the data that you're interested in, except it has digital pages. Instead of reading it, you interact with it.
Dashboards come in a wide variety of designs, depending on what you do and the analytics that you need to do it well. Using QuickSight, you can interact with your data on a webpage or your mobile device. If you also subscribe by mail, you can see a static preview of it.
The story told by your data reflects the expertise of the analysts and data scientists who built the dashboards. They refine the data, add calculations, find angles on the story, and decide how to present it. The publisher designs the dashboard and fills it with interactive data visualizations and controls that adjust your view. Publishers can customize the level of interactivity that you have, including filter and search options. You can interact with the active items on the screen to filter, sort, drill down, or jump to another tool.
When you view a dashboard, you're seeing the most recently received data. As you interact with the items on the screen, any changes you make change your view of the dashboard, and no one else's. Thus, your device's privacy is assured, although the publisher can tell what you looked at. After you close the dashboard, your explorations aren't preserved and neither is the data. As always, while you're an Amazon QuickSight reader, your monthly subscription is provided by the publishers of the dashboards at no additional cost to you.
If you're also a dashboard publisher—we call them authors, because they write reports—you can also save a copy of the dashboard for further analysis. If you find a new feature of the data that you want to publish, work with the original authors to update it. That way, everyone can see the same version of the story. However, you can also use your copy to learn how their design works or to inspire your work on something entirely new. Then, when you're finished, you can publish your analysis as a new dashboard.
To learn to set up dashboards, see Sharing and subscribing to data in Amazon QuickSight.
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