Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a small but helpful update to Amazon QuickSight, its web-based business intelligence (BI) tool for visualizing data. Now it’s possible to export data from a visualization into a .CSV file, which people can use in other software, including spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
Now when you’re inside a visualization of data in QuickSight and you’re interested in the underlying data, you can export to CSV by clicking on the down arrow in the top right corner of the visualization box and then clicking “Export to CSV.” The file that should download through your browser will include data fields as well as the data that you’ve filtered. You can export views again and again as you slice and dice your data.
CSV, which stands for comma-separated values, is a common data format that dates the 1970s and that isn’t tied to any one piece of software, unlike, say, Adobe’s .psd format and Microsoft’s .wma format. Now Amazon is embracing it in QuickSight, AWS announced today in a tweet.
Popular BI tools like Qlik and Tableau let people export certain data in CSV format. Microsoft’s Power BI app does, too.
AWS launched QuickSight in 2015 and brought it out of preview in November. Customers include Edmunds.com, Hotelbeds, Infor, and MLB Advanced Media.
