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

Connecting to files - AWS QuickSight Tutorial

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

Start my 1-month free trial

Connecting to files

“

- [Instructor] Examples of file types include Excel, CSV files, log files and JSON files. You can connect to these files either on your own computer or through shared folders. There are restrictions on the file size you can bring into QuickSight. So if you're working with a very large dataset, you'll probably want to explore other data connection options. We're going to connect to daily weather data containing temperatures and rainfall for California weather stations over a three-month plus period in 2020. We set up the data query to this NOAA web page called climate data online to receive a CSV file in the overviewing supported data sources video. I received the data query link via email. I can then navigate to the link on the screen to download my data or download it directly from the email. You can download this data file on your own or for those of you with access to the exercise files for this course, you can download it and save it to your own computer to follow along. This is the same data I'll be using to create the visualizations later in this course. Just download, you can scroll down to the bottom and select Download. If you open the CSV file, you'll see it actually opens an Excel as a dataset containing no formatting or formulas. CSV stands for comma separated values, and it's actually a text file with a format that Excel can easily read. One of the biggest benefits of CSV files is that you can store an unlimited number of records in it. If you open the CSV file using Notepad, notice there are commas between the values where we encountered column separators in the Excel file. We also have an Excel file to connect to that's going to provide us with the key for the Los Angeles area airports. You can see there's a tab named Key that we want to connect to in QuickSight. There's also another tab containing some information, more of a title page that we don't necessarily need. You can access this in your exercise files as well. And QuickSight, we start at our dataset page, and we select to the first option, Upload a file. This opens a folder window where we select our CSV file in the folder path location where we saved it to. Once you select the file, the CSV file at the top, you can click Open to extract the weather data. Once QuickSight sets up the connection, you'll see another dialog box with a small preview of the data. You can select next to continue to add it to our dataset. We now see the details of the data source we connected to including the table name, which is the file name, the estimated table size, so we know how much room it could be taking up in SPICE. And we see that it's successfully imported into SPICE with the two orange SPICE icons, and then also the green checkmark next to the SPICE availability. You can select to visualize it from here, or you can select to Edit or Preview the data. Out of best practice habits, I recommend selecting to edit or preview the data, just to make sure the table looks okay before loading it. If you get too far along in the process of creating visualizations, and realize there's an issue, it may take much longer to retrace your steps and recreate the visuals. We're going to hit Save to keep the details for our new CSV file connection. And we see it appear as a dataset within our QuickSight dataset management page. It also takes us back to the main dataset page, where we can set up another data connection. Let's choose new dataset again. On this main dataset page, we're going to set up another dataset connection. Again, we select Upload a file, and this time, we're going to point it to the LA airport key Excel file. Make sure that you're not in the Excel file when you're trying to connect to it, otherwise it will give you a message that the file is in use and you cannot set up the connection. We select the LA airports, hit Open. Next we can select the sheet from within the file. We want to use key because that's going to provide us the key for our data. I continue with Select, once you confirm the upload settings, and now we can again select to Edit or Preview the data. And we see another data connection setup in QuickSight. We hit to save it, which takes us back to our dataset page where we now see our connection for our Excel file and also for our CSV file.

Contents