Installing QuickSight Application

3 min read

In this article by Rajesh Nadipalli, the author of the book Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight, we will see how you can install the Amazon QuickSight app from the Apple iTunes store for no cost. You can search for the app from the iTunes store and then proceed to download and install or alternatively you can follow this link to download the app.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Amazon QuickSight app is certified to work with iOS devices running iOS v9.0 and above.

Once you have the app installed, you can then proceed to login to your QuickSight account as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.1: QuickSight sign in

The Amazon QuickSight app is designed to access dashboards and analyses on your mobile device. All interactions on the app are read-only and changes you make on your device are not applied to the original visuals so that you can explore without any worry.

Dashboards on the go

After you login to the QuickSight app, you will first see the list of dashboards associated to your QuickSight account for easy access. If you don’t see dashboards, then click on Dashboards icon from the menu at the bottom of your mobile device as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.2: Accessing dashboards

You will now see the list of dashboards associated to your user ID.

Dashboard detailed view

From the dashboard listing, select the USA Census Dashboard, which will then redirect you to the detailed dashboard view. In the detailed dashboard view you will see all visuals that are part of that dashboard. You can click on the arrow to the extreme top right of each visual to open the specific chart in full screen mode as shown in the following screenshot. In the scatter plot analysis shown in the following screenshot, you can further click on any of the dots to get specific values about that bubble. In the following screenshot the selected circle is for zip code 94027 which has PopulationCount of 7,089 and MedianIncome of $216,905 and MeanIncome of $336,888:

Figure 1.3: Dashboard visual

Dashboard search

QuickSight mobile app also provides a search feature, which is handy if you know only partial name of the dashboard. Follow the following steps to search for a dashboard:

First ensure you are in the dashboards tab by clicking on the Dashboards icon from the bottom menu.
Next click on the search icon seen on the top right corner.
Next type the partial name. In the following example, i have typed Usa.
QuickSight now searches for all dashboards that have the word Usa in it and lists them out.
You can next click on the dashboard to get details about that specific dashboard as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.4: Dashboard search

Favorite a dashboard

QuickSight provides a convenient way to bookmark your dashboards by setting them as favorites. To use this feature, first identify which dashboards you often use and click on the star icon to it’s right side as shown in the following screenshot. Next to access all of your favorites, click on the Favorites tab and the list is then refined to only those dashboards you had previously identified as favorite:

Figure 1.5: Dashboard favorites

Limitations of mobile app

While dashboards are fairly easy to interact with on the mobile app, there are key limitations when compared to the standard browser version, which I am listing as follows:

You cannot create share dashboards to others using the mobile app.
You cannot zoom in/out from the visual, which would be really good in scenarios where the charts are dense.
Chart legends are not shown.

Summary

We have seen how to install Amazon QuickSight app and using this app you can browse, search, and view dashboards. We have covered how to access dashboards, search, favorite, and its detailed view. We have also seen some limitations of mobile app.