Boost productivity with imported visuals in Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-native, serverless business intelligence (BI) service that simplifies data analysis and insights sharing across organizations. It offers machine learning (ML) powered features, including natural language querying and AI-generated insights, alongside traditional BI capabilities like interactive dashboards and paginated reports.

At QuickSight, we’ve always prioritized ease of use—a quality our customers love. Although we continually add new customization options for creating stunning dashboards and reports, we recognize that these features can sometimes increase design time as users explore new controls. To address this, we are excited to introduce Import Visuals, a powerful new productivity feature that balances customization with efficiency.

Import Visuals allows authors to seamlessly import visuals from existing dashboards or analyses they have access to, into another analysis, streamlining the dashboard and report creation process and enhancing collaboration.

The Import Visuals functionality identifies and brings over all associated dependencies, such as datasets, parameters, calculated fields, filter definitions, and visual properties, including conditional formatting rules from a source dashboard. At the destination, the feature resolves conflicts, eliminates duplicates, rescopes filter definitions, and adjusts the visuals to match different sheet types and layouts while respecting the destination theme. Imported visuals are forked from the source, meaning they are no longer linked to the original.

Solution overview

Authors can boost productivity by importing visuals rather than recreating them from scratch. This feature also enables collaborative dashboard building, with team members working on assigned sets of visuals across different analysis and then combine them in a single analysis

Import Visuals boosts productivity by allowing authors to reuse existing work, eliminating the need to recreate visuals from scratch. This feature significantly reduces development time and promotes collaboration, as team members can work independently on dashboard components and effortlessly combine them. The result is a more flexible and efficient approach to analysis creation.

Customer success story: Docebo

Early adopter customers are already using this powerful feature for innovative solutions to boost their end-users’ productivity. One such use case has been deployed by Docebo, where they bootstrapped dashboard creation by pre-curating a visual library and sharing it with end authors.

Docebo, a leading learning management system provider, has used Import Visuals to enhance their analytics offering. Laurent Balagué, VP of Products at Docebo, shares: “This feature is at the core of our analytics product. Our customers love how simple it is to build a custom dashboard in just a few clicks.”

Docebo has boosted their analytics adoption using QuickSight, offering a tiered embedded analytics solution to all their customers. To learn more about Docebo’s QuickSight journey, see Docebo increases analytics adoption five times by embedding Amazon QuickSight on their Docebo platform.

Import visuals in QuickSight

1. Open the destination analysis where you want to import the visual, then choose the Import Visual icon or choose File, Import to import the source artifact.
2. The asset explorer modal will display a list of eligible source artifacts (analyses and dashboards) you have access to. Choose the desired source artifact and choose Load.
3. From the source artifact, select the visuals you want to import, then choose Import. You can only import visuals from a single sheet at a time.

After a successful import, the selected visuals will be added to the destination analysis, retaining their original properties (styling, title, and so on). The visuals will inherit the theme-level properties from the applied theme on the destination analysis, allowing for further customization.

Limitations

This preview launch has the following limitations, which will be addressed in upcoming releases:

• In this preview version, only visuals from a single sheet can be imported at one time.
• All visuals except the following can be imported:
  • Text box
    
  • Insights visual
    
  • Image component
    
  • Highcharts visual
    
  • Custom visual content
    
  • Layered map visual
    
• Filter controls can’t be imported.
• The folders view isn’t available in the assets explorer modal. Also, the ability to import from and to restricted folders isn’t currently supported.
• Only URL actions are supported.

Conclusion

Import Visuals represents a significant step forward in our mission to make data visualization more accessible and efficient. By allowing authors to reuse and adapt existing visuals, it not only improves authors’ productivity, but also empowers them further to promote consistency across their organization’s dashboards. We’re excited to see how you’ll use Import Visuals to streamline your workflow and create even more impactful visualizations. As always, we welcome your feedback as we continue to enhance this feature.

About the Authors

Deepak Sahi is a Solutions Architect at AWS based out of Zurich, Switzerland. He has close to two decades of experience in the field of data analytics, primarily in business intelligence and data warehousing. He has worked worldwide as a consultant in domains such as telecom, finance, insurance, and healthcare for many Fortune 500 companies. He is currently focusing on manufacturing companies in Switzerland and helps them build secure and innovative cloud solutions, enable data-driven decisions, and solve their business challenges.

Andres Castro is a Senior Solutions Architect in Global Financial Services. He has been working in the consulting and financial sector for the past 25 as a DevOps Engineer, Finance Data Solutions Architect, and Cloud Engineer before joining AWS. He is passionate about business intelligence, data governance, data analytics, and everything cloud.

Cristian Coppa is a Principal Account Manager with over 20 years of expertise in telecommunications and IT sectors, with a focus on business development and people management. Throughout his career, Cristian has successfully managed diverse client relationships, ranging from SOHO and SME businesses to corporate and multinational enterprises. Cristian joined AWS in 2019 as Account Manager for software vendor companies based out of Italy, helping them grow in their cloud journey and achieve their business goals through co-sell and co-marketing initiatives.

Bhupinder Chadha is a senior product manager for Amazon QuickSight focused on visualization and front-end experiences. He is passionate about BI, data visualization and low-code/no-code experiences. Prior to QuickSight he was the lead product manager for Inforiver, responsible for building a enterprise BI product from ground up. Bhupinder started his career in presales, followed by a small gig in consulting and then PM for xViz, an add on visualization product.