Hi Amazon Team -
We’ve just started on our second attempt at utilizing Paginated Reports and have several feature requests that without implementation, ultimately stand in the way of us continuing down this path. If some of these requests end up being user error - let me know! We use QuickSight Dashboards extensively and would love to provide paginated reports to a wider audience.
For these requests, imagine that you are a QuickSight user and have an upcoming meeting with a user of your technology. To prepare for the meeting, you log in to QS, find the paginated report for something like support tickets submitted, select the person you are meeting with, and export the paginated PDF.
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Pivot Table formatting > Pivot tables do not offer the ability to auto-fit the width of the column(s) to fit the length of text presented. You are able to hard-code a pixel width for the cell width and hight in a pivot table, but not for the headers. Row headers are hardly ever conformed to a specific length for our use cases, so just dragging the width out wider is not a sufficient solve for the pivot table row headers. Example in screenshot, number 1.
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Chart visuals must NOT be able to split in half and traverse pages. I understand if a table must extend length-wise down to another page, but a bar chart or similar visual should not be permitted to split EVER. Example provided in screenshot, number 2
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Visuals should not be permitted to overlap. QuickSight does provide a warning that “expanded visuals in this section may overlap” which as a whole I don’t think should be possible. A standard analysis allows you to select between “Tiled” or “Freeform” on the sheet, but a paginated report does not. If a visual is going to extend down upon report generation, it should push the next visual down further and not overlap. Example provided in screenshot, number 3.
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Turning paginated reports on has changed the UI for QuickSight, making it feel ancient. As soon as we turned on paginated reports, our QuickSight UI has reverted being older-looking and there no longer is a color differentiator between analyses or dashboards, all icons are just black. Example provided in screenshot, number 4.
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Repeating sections must give us the ability to add a page break after each repeating section, not just after the section that contains the repeating info. If we create a section that takes up about a page and then turn that section to be repeating for the top 5 XYZ criteria, we want to be able to show Section 1 on its own page, Section 2 after a page break on its own page, Section 3 after a page break on its own page, etc. The current functionality provides a page break after the entire section, but not each repeating section. Today, we would have to individually build each section on its own instead of utilizing the repeating section functionality. No screenshot provided.
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We must be able to upload thumbnail images to represent a dashboard in QuickSight. The current UI just shows one visualization as the thumbnail image for a dashboard, which makes finding a specific dashboard in the grid view very difficult. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t requested this yet before, it would make the UI of QuickSight so much cleaner. No screenshot provided.
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For paginated reports and dashboards, it would be great if we could hide a visual or display alternate text if a visual has no data instead of “No Data: There was no data found for the visual”. That text is not something we could ever show to a end user, nor we want to show to our internal consumers of the report. I’m sure there is some hacky way we could do it with a rule or interaction on the visual, but there should be an option to provide alternate text when there is no data or to hide that visual and slide other visuals higher (if intended). No screenshot provided.
Happy to discuss any of these requests/questions with the team, or in a thread of comments below
