Visualizing Data with Amazon QuickSight

Course Overview
Hey everyone, my name is Aaron Medacco and welcome to my course: Visualizing Data with Amazon QuickSight. I'm a software developer and cloud architect specialized in Amazon Web Services. As the largest cloud provider in the world, it's no surprise that Amazon Web Services is getting into the BI game with their new business analytics service: QuickSight. Whether you already store your data in the Amazon Cloud or elsewhere, QuickSight allows you to analyze your data to gain those critical business insights that inform better decision-making. In this course, I'll show you everything you need to perform data analysis with your data in Amazon QuickSight. The major topics that we'll cover in this course include QuickSight account creation and management, connecting your data wherever it lives to the QuickSight service, data preparation using filters, calculated fields and more, and data analysis, leveraging the features and visualizations provided by Amazon QuickSight. By the end of this course, you'll have mastered the skills required to implement Amazon QuickSight as your business intelligence solution. Before beginning this course, you should have a basic understanding of Amazon Web Services. Aside from that, any experience or knowledge of data services offered by AWS can be helpful but isn't required. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to use Amazon QuickSight with the Visualizing Data with Amazon QuickSight course here at Pluralsight.

Connecting Your Data Sources
Before we can get our hands dirty with the QuickSight tool set, we first need to establish connectivity to our data sources, whether they're stored on-prem or in the Amazon Cloud. In this module, we'll cover everything you need to know about getting your data connected to the QuickSight service. We'll demonstrate firsthand how to connect databases hosted by a variety of AWS services, how to bring files into QuickSight ad hoc or from S3, and also what steps you'll need to take to connect your on-prem data as well. Let's dive in.

Preparing Your Data Sets
Now that we've connected our data sources to QuickSight, it's time to prepare the data coming from them in such a way that we can analyze and visualize it effectively. Often we want to paint a picture with our data. We want to visualize it in the best way possible to get the insights that we're looking for. We make that easier by preparing our data sets first. Data preparation helps us by making sure the sets of data we visualize contain the information we're looking for in the formats we want. It also gives us a chance to exclude or remove noise. Columns or rows that don't offer value for the analysis we want to do. In this module, we'll cover how you can perform different kinds of data preparation in QuickSight. Let's get started.

Visualizing and Analyzing Your Data
We finally made it to the most rewarding step of the QuickSight workflow, visualizing and analyzing our data. This is where we'll take the data sets we've crafted in data preparation, and gain the business intelligence and the insights we're looking for. We've come a long way so far in this course, and this is where things get fun. In this module, we'll review everything you'll need to know to analyze your data in QuickSight effectively. There's a lot to cover, so let's dive in.