Line Graphs & Forecasting in QuickSight | West Loop Strategy

Hello, I'm Dylan, a cloud developer at West Loop Strategy, an AWS partner. As part of a learning series for QuickSight Dashboard visuals, we are going to discuss the features and functionalities available with line graphs.

When building out visuals, often an important way to display a metric is by showing a trend so the viewer can understand the performance over time. This is when utilizing a line graph can be very impactful if we understand all of the features that are at our disposal.

Today we will focus on displaying trends for multiple groups and another for forecasting the future trends. In a case where you want to display the profit for the company over a year, while breaking it down into a few different metrics, the color field well is going to do the best tool to utilize. One thing to take note of is if we take advantage of this feature, we will lose the ability to forecast the future data on the line graph.

For our first visual, I want to focus specifically on how profits have been for our products throughout this year. Let's add a new line graph visual and we can add our order date, profit, and products into our field wells. Now as you can see, my data goes back to January of 2020, So we can add a filter to just display from January 1st this year up to today.

Once I update to the data for this year, I can change our date field to aggregate by week. This trend will give us some insight and how we want to advertise our products next year. Maybe there is one that isn't worth selling at all, maybe some do well enough that they don't need our attention, and others are on the cusp of bringing big gains in the years to come. We want to use this opportunity to guide the reviewer to build the most efficient plan to improve profits by products in the coming year.

Next we can turn our attention to forecasting. Now that we can see our profits split up by product, lets create another line graph that will display our profits and sales over time. It is one thing to see our total sales or our total profits, but it can often be helpful to see the gap between the two metrics to understand how we could reduce the profit loss on our sales. Since we're not utilizing the color field well, we can still display two different metrics, but now we can also utilize the machine learning built into QuickSites to view the predictions for next year. Click on the light bulb icon displayed on the visual and select setup forecasting.

Here we have some options to manage the timeframe, forecast boundaries, and prediction interval for the forecast. To make it simple, let's build the forecasting model to show our trends for next year. I will simply change my period forward to 12 and hit apply. Now you can see the prediction trends for sales and profit through December 2024. This can help provide your company with goals for the new year to beat the prediction, and also provide insights in a certain months of the year that have been expected lull in sales to improve budgeting for that time period.

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