Hands-on – creating a simple QuickSight visualization

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how data can be represented over a geographic area. We used the example of data containing information on the population of world cities, and how we could use that to easily visualize how large cities are geographically distributed. The example visual in Figure 12.2 showed cities with a population of over 5 million people, displayed on top of a map of the world.

For the hands-on section of this chapter, we are going to recreate that visual using Amazon QuickSight.

Setting up a new QuickSight account and loading a dataset

Before we start creating a new dashboard, we need to download a sample dataset of world city populations. We will use the basic dataset available from https://simplemaps.com/, which is freely distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/):

1. Use the following link to download the basic...