AWS Business Intelligence Blog
Introducing repeating sections in Amazon QuickSight pixel-perfect reports
Pixel-perfect reports in Amazon QuickSight enable you to create and share highly formatted, personalized reports containing business-critical data to hundreds of thousands of end-users without infrastructure setup or maintenance, upfront licensing, or long-term commitments.
To save time copying the same visual multiple times to filter for different values and generate an invoice for all your customers, you can use repeating sections in pixel-perfect reports. With repeating sections, authors can build visuals in a report one time but have the system repeat for as many values of a dimension exist.
In this post, we demonstrate how to use this new feature.
What is a repeating section?
Repeating sections repeat the visuals within the section based on the values of a dimension in the data. They are used to create classic banded reports, as well as repeating pages or sections for different dimensions. They’re also ideal if you want to build multi-page formatted reports that repeat visuals with different data slices. For example, imagine you wanted to see a table for the top three products by revenue in each country. With repeating sections, you can set the repeating section to repeat by country. This will iterate through each country, show relevant rows for each country in the table, and add it to the report. Repeating sections dynamically render all content in that section in its entirety for each value in the dimension, including tables, graphs, calculations, sorting, machine learning insights, and custom content.
Repeating sections by multiple dimensions
With repeating sections, you can repeat the section across up to three dimensions. For example, consider Year, Country, and Industry. In this case, repeating sections will start with the first value for all three, and then iterate through all the values in Industry. Then it will go to the next country, and iterate through all values of Industry for that country. After all the countries have been iterated through for the first year, it will move to the next year and begin iterating through industry by the first country again. The process repeats until all three dimensions have been iterated through.
Authors can add titles based on the value of the dimension and add page breaks after each section instance. Authors can also add filters on dimensions. For example, you can add a filter on a region dimension to only repeat sections for the filtered regions. You can also add top and bottom filters to the repeating sections.
Add repeating sections
To add repeating sections, follow these steps:
- Open the Repeating Section menu for SECTION 1 by choosing the Edit repeating section icon on the top left of the section.
The visual will be in hierarchy layout by default.
- Choose ADD DIMENSION and choose Region. You can add up to a maximum of three dimensions.
- Choose AMER and APJ to see how section visuals change according to the value of the dimension.
- If you have a use case to exclude visuals from repeating based on a dimension, you can do so by choosing the Exclude visual from repeating dropdown menu and choosing the visual. This is so the identical visual appears in every repeating section, for example the Summary table in all the sections.
- To specify a page break after each instance of the repeating section, select Page break after each instance. An instance can either be distinct values of a dimension or a unique combination of values of multiple dimensions.
You might have a requirement to repeat for only N dimension values based on a top or bottom filter criteria. For example, if you want to only show repeating sections for the top five countries within each region based on sales, you can do so by following these steps:
- Choose ADD DIMENSION and choose Country.
- Choose the options menu (three dots) next to Country and choose Edit.
- For Sort by, choose the field Sales and set Aggregation to Sum.
- For Sort order, choose Descending (we want the top five countries).
- Update the value to 5 in the Limit to
- Choose APPLY.
Use case 1: Delivery note slips
For this use case, the QuickSight team sends deliveries to business partners across different geographic locations for a promotional campaign. Reports are generated to make sure everything is in place for the ecommerce fulfillment process. Each printed packing slip contains an itemized list of the items that are part of a shipment order. This allows verification that all items were received at the provided shipping address. The report includes a barcode for the shipped order, bill-to and ship-to address details, and order details with the SKU, quantity, dimensions and weight for each item. It also includes a delivery note in case any items are fragile or perishable.
The repeating section feature is used here to print the packing slip for each packaged order sent to business partners. The following example illustrates how this reporting scenario provides a report of delivered shipments to business partners.
Use case 2: Medical reports
For this use case, Any Medical Health Group built a reporting workbench to generate presentation reports for stakeholders who manage the hospitals in the group. The reports are generated each day and help the operational managers of each hospital and staff by tracking summaries of reported cases by health condition across service lines. They also help look at monthly trends of cases and the distribution of cases by age and severity.
The reports start with aggregated data for all hospitals and service lines. They are then broken down into more detailed reports for each individual service line. These reports show the health conditions, weekly trends, and case distributions by severity for that service line. The reports are further broken down to show this same level of detail for each individual hospital.
To consolidate all the aggregated and detailed sections into a single report, you can use repeating sections. This allows each hospital’s report to first show a summary across all of its service lines. Then, for each service line, the report breaks down the data by health condition, weekly trends, and case distribution by severity.
Key considerations
Pixel-perfect reports in QuickSight allow you to create reports with repeated sections to visualize data across multiple dimensions. However, as of writing, the insights visual type is currently not compatible with repeated sections. Additionally, there is a limit of 1,000 combinations that can be displayed across dimensions used in repeated sections, but this is a soft limit.
Another key factor to consider is that if a specific combination of values for a dimension in a repeated section doesn’t have any corresponding data, any charts or tables within that repeated section iteration will show “No Data” instead of visualizations.
Conclusion
This post explored how to use repeating sections in pixel-perfect reports in QuickSight. Each repeating section is rendered dynamically. Authors can repeat sections on up to three dimensions, use filters on those dimensions, and customize where titles and page breaks appear in each section instance. You can use repeating sections to create classic banded reports, as well as repeating pages or sections for different dimensions. This feature is also ideal if you want to build multi-page formatted reports that repeat visuals with different data slices.
Take control of your business-critical operational reporting with QuickSight pixel-perfect reports. This fully managed cloud solution streamlines report creation, scheduling, and sharing across your entire organization. Design pixel-perfect, multi-page reports that share your analytics in a professional, print-ready format. Customize each page with layouts, images, and data visualizations from QuickSight. Then distribute your reports in PDF, Excel, or CSV formats for viewing by colleagues or stakeholders. Start using the power of pixel-perfect reports in QuickSight today! To learn more, visit Amazon QuickSight Pixel-perfect reports, get hands-on with a workshop, and dive deeper into the details.
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About the authors
Krishna Adettiwar is a Solutions Architect at AWS. He is passionate about using cutting-edge technologies to solve hard business problems and has helped hundreds of customers learn, design, and build on AWS in the process. Krishna loves hiking, the performing arts, public transportation, and spending time with his friends and family.
Neeraj Kumar is a Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight, AWS’ cloud-native, fully managed BI service. Neeraj started his career as software engineer building software applications for automotive, manufacturing and telecom companies, he further progressed as specialist and while working at Cognizant he was responsible for designing and developing end-to-end Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions for major Insurance companies.
Rahul Easwar is a Senior Product Manager with Amazon QuickSight. He is the product leader for Amazon QuickSight Paginated Reporting responsible for the product launch in 2022 and continues to focus on new product innovations. Rahul has over 15 years of experience implementing and leading global Analytics programs for organizations across various industry verticals.
Salim Khan is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Amazon QuickSight. Salim has over 16 years of experience implementing enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions. Prior to AWS, Salim worked as a BI consultant catering to industry verticals like Automotive, Healthcare, Entertainment, Consumer, Publishing and Financial Services. He has delivered business intelligence, data warehousing, data integration and master data management solutions across enterprises.