If you are holding this book in your hands, chances are that you know a thing or two about QlikView. And if you have experienced QlikView at least a little bit, you are probably just as amazed by it as most of us QlikView professionals. People often wonder what makes QlikView so attractive and fascinating. I can offer my own version of an explanation.

In our complex and hectic world, QlikView offers SIMPLICITY. In our world of multi-volume operational manuals, endless regulations, processes and procedures, service-level agreements, and software development life cycles, QlikView is like a sip of cold sparkling water on a hot summer afternoon. It's like playing a video game while everybody else around is working hard.

This abundant simplicity makes QlikView a perfect tool for people in business that would otherwise never consider themselves to be application developers. This includes business analysts, managers, supply chain professionals, credit analysts, and other business people, hungry for information and happy to get access to it in such a simple way.

Simplicity shouldn't, however, be mistaken for plainness. Despite the ease of use, QlikView has a lot of depth. And ease of use shouldn't be mistaken for illiteracy. You still need to know what you are doing in order to produce a worthy analysis.

That is why this book will provide tremendous value to huge masses of business analysts that have the opportunity to use QlikView in their jobs, and want to get the most out of it. It will teach people how to leverage QlikView's simplicity to produce insightful visualizations.

When I first heard that Karl Pover had written a book about QlikView visualizations, I thought to myself "Oh, no! Not another QlikView book for beginners.". In the last few years, a number of QlikView books for beginners have been published, some better than others (I personally recommend QlikVew 11 for Developers, Barry Harmsen and Mike Garcia, and QlikView 11 for Developers Cookbook, Stephen Redmond). So, at that point, I clearly couldn't see the value of another beginners' book. However, after I read the final draft, I realized that this book is very different. It has a different purpose and a different audience. Most other QlikView books teach QlikView. This book teaches how to build effective visualizations using QlikView. In other words, instead of teaching you properties of a scatter chart, this book will first teach you what type of analysis require a scatter chart before going on to instruct you how to put one together in QlikView and make its presentation meaningful and professional.

The author, Karl Pover, is an excellent educator and practitioner. He sharpened his pencil on QlikCommunity, the forum of QlikView professionals where thousands of QlikView developers share knowledge and help each other grow. Karl and I first met there, in the tight group of Top 10 Contributors. Karl was helping hundreds of new developers with his technical advice. For many of the active QlikCommunity contributors, answering hundreds of questions was the best way of learning the deepest layers of QlikView's functionality.

As one of the first QlikView consultants in Mexico, Karl has a passion for improving the quality of QlikView services, coupled with his keen sense of design and presentation. Karl's work in QlikView and this book is clearly influenced by Stephen Few and Edward Tufte, the two gurus that have shaped the industry standards of data visualization.

In Learning QlikView Data Visualization, Karl Pover describes several common types of analysis, along with the best practices of data visualization. He then combines this with the technical workflow of configuring them in QlikView and boils it all down to a simple recipe. For example, this is how you do trend analysis in QlikView, and this is how you improve it to make it more meaningful.

This book is fast and intense. In about a hundred pages, it will teach you the basics of building effective visualizations in QlikView, and will leave you with the desire to learn more.

Oleg Troyansky

President

Natural Synergies, Inc.