QuickSight Visuals - Custom Insight Narratives

Hello, I'm Dylan, a cloud developer at West Loop Strategy, an AWS Partner. As part of our AWS Analytics expert series, we are going to discuss building narratives to create custom insights in QuickSight.

Insights are a really great tool to take advantage of when building dashboards in QuickSight. When you are building out your analysis, some options will be automatically populated based on the visuals you have created and the data you are utilizing. This makes adding some of these comparison metrics directly onto the sheet very simple. Now when you start getting to the point where you want to build one from scratch or edit one of the default options, things can get tricky. The language that is built into the narratives is going to be different from any of the other calculations you will use in QuickSight.

To explain how some of the syntax works, let's start by adding one of the default options to our sheet and make some edits. I'm going to add an insight that takes the top three customers for profit and open the editor. You can see that some of the computations are automatically added. Now we have the ability to use functions from calculated fields, utilize parameter values, or add more computations based on the current fields or new ones.

If this insight is going to be filtered by certain categories with a parameter, you can use that value so your text can update to display that change dynamically. You can also customize the number of values being returned. By default, you are going to bring in the top three or bottom three options of a category, but if you have a larger number of groupings, you can always switch to the top five, or even bring in your single top performer to highlight that.

Now this is where things will get a little bit more complicated. If we want to bring in more fields to display with our insight, we can add them into field wells. Now you will notice they do not automatically add into your available calculations, but when you click the Add Computation button, you can choose which calculation you want to display and select the field you added from the drop-down. Here is where we can start working on adding multiple values within an inside.

One thing to remember is that when you have a narrative like this one, where we are using a four loop to display our values, you are not able to add another loop inside of it. But you are able to add an inline if. This is where we can start playing around with building out our calculated fields to match category values and update our results. Even just adding some total aggregate value to display in the visual can help provide a bigger picture for the reader.

I highly recommend playing around with adding new calculations within the four loops or building multiple if statements to create a more diverse set of insights to bring more comparison metrics to your readers.

Thanks for joining us today. To find more exciting coverage of how we help our customers use AWS cloud technologies, or to schedule a QuickSight training session.

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