From the course: Learning Amazon Web Services (AWS) QuickSight

Comparing cloud vs. desktop applications - AWS QuickSight Tutorial

From the course: Learning Amazon Web Services (AWS) QuickSight

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Comparing cloud vs. desktop applications

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- [Instructor] AWS QuickSight is a cloud-based application that you can access directly through the AWS console, along with numerous other AWS applications within the same space. The good news is that you can try out QuickSight for free if your own monthly usage is relatively low. If you're following along with the project in this course, the dataset we'll use will easily fit within these limits. AWS adds updates and enhancements to QuickSight every month. Unlike Power BI and Tableau, QuickSight doesn't also have a desktop application version. It's entirely configured and accessed within the AWS cloud. This is beneficial by letting you consolidate your work with others and securely save your work into a cloud storage location. However, this also means you cannot work offline in QuickSight. You may also be at the mercy of internet latency slowing your progress. Before you can begin working in QuickSight, you'll first need to set up an AWS account. You'll provide your name and contact details, along with a credit card, which AWS only charges if you exceed your allocated QuickSight data limit for a single month. If you have a .edu email address and your institution doesn't already have an AWS account, you can sign up for an account on the AWS Educate platform. Once you sign up for an AWS account, you'll see the AWS Console home screen that lists the available applications within the portal. You can scroll down within the AWS homepage to navigate to the QuickSight application. But I find it's faster to just type QuickSight into the Find Services search bar. Once you see QuickSight appear in the search results, you can select it to open the application. If you don't already have a QuickSight account, you can sign up for a free one by selecting sign up for QuickSight on the QuickSight home screen. You can choose between the Enterprise and standard options. For the purposes of this course, I'm going to use the Enterprise edition, which lets us test out all the QuickSight functionalities we'll walk through in this course. If you want to use the standard account, you can follow along for most of the course. I'll point out where the paths diverge to avoid confusion. We select continue with Enterprise version selected to move on to the next screen. On the next screen, you'll enter an account name. And you'll also enter the notification email address that you want to receive QuickSight alerts. You can also select to enable invitation by email. You want to set this up initially because you can see that you cannot change this setting once your sign-up's complete. We'll keep the default settings for now and select finish to properly set up our QuickSight account. Once we see a message that we've properly signed up, we can go to Amazon QuickSight by clicking on the button. Here's where we'll begin working in QuickSight for this course. By default, you see this QuickSight account uses the English language interface. You can easily change the user interface text to another language. We choose the user profile icon in the top right. Then we scroll down to the English option, where we can see there are 10 languages to use in the QuickSight interface that we have the option to select from. Let's switch this to French to see Francais by selecting it from the list. Once these changes save, you can see the language updates in the QuickSight user interface. It doesn't, however, translate the user input, data, dates, or number formats. We follow the same procedure to change it back to English, which is the language interface we want to use in this course. Depending on your account setup, you may see that you have analysis already on the page. Sometimes QuickSight will provide example analysis that you can start your exploration and testing of data with.

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