In this section, we’ll use QuickSight’s features to improve dashboard quality.
Sheets (aka sheets or tabs) are a great way to help organize content so you don’t feel the need to cram everything into one page. Typically, the first sheet will include summary metrics and then provide detailed information on another sheet. Sheets can easily be duplicated in an analysis, which can come in handy while you’re testing and developing a new dashboard.
Theme allows you to quickly ‘makeover’ your dashboard using custom colors, alternative fonts, and other options like controlling the spacing between images. There are three independent themes to choose from, but you can create your own. Themes you create are shareable with other accounts, so you can define standard themes for your organization and share with accounts within your organization. Once you create a custom theme, you only need 1 click to apply it to your existing analytics/dashboard. Small changes to the theme can make a big difference in terms of aesthetics, and we know users will easily absorb the beautiful dashboard!
Field formats (such as date format, number format such as displaying as a percentage or currency, or changing units or number of decimal places, etc.) are located in two locations - at the field level and the visual level. When you set the format at the field level, it will be applied whenever that field is used (recommended). Sometimes you may want the format of a field to display differently in a particular image (perhaps to summarize or add detail by adjusting units or decimal places), so setting the field format on the image will override the default formatting you applied.
Visual Formatting goes very deep and each visualization has different types of formats. For example, on line and bar charts (usual charts with axes), you can adjust the axis title, axis scale, markers, gridlines, data labels, tooltips, and more. On the pivot table, you’ll see different options like expand/collapse functionality, adjust header and cell font sizes, add subtotals and metric totals, and more. When you want to customize the visual formatting beyond colors and font types (recommended at the Theme level), be sure to check out the Visual Format menu on each chart to see what options are available.