Questions and answers generated from Webex transcript
Q: Is there a chance that Amazon Quick can be integrated into Excel, Word, or Outlook?
A: Amazon Quick does have extensions that may support integration with Microsoft Office applications — a colleague who specializes in extensions would be the best resource for specifics. Note that Amazon Quick Automate specifically does not have a direct integration into Excel. If you’d like more details on extensions, feel free to post the question in the community channel and the right team member can follow up.
Q: Why do we use brackets for column names when adding columns in Quick Automate?
A: The brackets represent a list, which allows you to add multiple columns at once. Since columns have a defined sequence, the bracket/list format ties closely to how Excel represents column order. This way, you can describe an ordered set of column names in a single input. The team is always open to feedback on visual representation preferences.
Q: Is there a feature for handling password-protected Excel files in Quick Automate?
A: In the scenarios demonstrated, Excel files should be accessible without file-level passwords. Typically, authentication is handled at the storage level (e.g., the S3 bucket or file location), rather than at the file itself. A use case where the actual Excel file is password-protected has not been encountered yet, but this is a great question and the team is happy to follow up with more details.
Q: If I don’t use S3, can I pull from and save to a Space in Amazon Quick using Quick Automate?
A: Currently, you can save files to the shared file storage within your automation group, but saving directly to a Space is not supported through the default drag-and-drop actions in the studio. However, Amazon Quick has released a number of public APIs, and if a Space write API is available, you could call it from within your automation to write to a Space programmatically.
Q: I’m having permissions issues running automations — it runs on a virtual desktop that doesn’t have permissions, and I don’t have an AWS account. What can I do?
A: Amazon Quick Automate does not support desktop automations, so a virtual desktop environment is not a supported use case at this time. An AWS account is required to run automations in Quick Automate.
Q: Can you explain the use case for using Textract with PDF files in Quick Automate?
A: The standard “Extract Text” action from the PDF actions pulls text as it appears in the soft/digital version of the PDF. If you need to extract structured data — like a customer ID, name, or address — in a key-value pair format (JSON) that can be consumed in subsequent automation steps, Textract APIs are the better option. There are two Textract APIs available: “Read Document” and “Query Document,” which both perform key-value pair mapping from the PDF content. You can also have a custom agent use the Textract API and then parse the JSON response to return just a single value. This was covered in more depth in an earlier session focused on multi-agent architectures.
Q: I extract tables from a Quick dashboard to Excel each week, edit them, save as CSV, and use them in a Quick Flow analysis. Is Quick Automate a good use case for this?
A: There is not yet a direct integration between Quick Automate and QuickSight dashboards. However, if your starting point is an Excel file, you could use Quick Automate for the manipulation steps. That said, Quick Automate is best suited for complex business processes that require extensive logging and auditability. If the workflow is simply converting data to Excel and saving as CSV without needing to review or audit the transformations later, Quick Flows would likely be a better fit for that use case.