QlikView is one of the most powerful analytical tools in the market. Based on an in memory associative model, it lets users freely navigate through the data, spot trends, and make better decisions. This platform is capable of integrating a wide range of data sources, such as ERP systems, data warehouses, or spreadsheets, into a single application in order to display dashboards with state-of-the-art visualizations.
Creating a dashboard is more than just packing a couple of charts and tables together. It is a complex endeavor that involves understanding the business, working with multiple data sources, and presenting the data in the most efficient and elegant ways to foster discoveries. The adequate management of these three elements—business needs, data models, and visualizations—is the key to a successful BI initiative.
The art of communicating effectively is not one that can be easily mastered. A good data visualization can help users understand the current performance of the company and see details that cannot be seen otherwise. It is a means of presenting, explaining, and interacting with the information. When a dashboard is created with well-chosen graphics, insights come naturally. Throughout this book, we will embark on a journey that will take us from theoretical to pragmatic, sharing tips, tricks, and best practices, all in the pursuit of stunning dashboards that derive in tangible value for the business.
Chapter 1, Know Your Battlefield, Devise Your Strategy, is the starting point of this journey, where we discuss what lies behind a QlikView initiative.
Chapter 2, All about Dashboard Design Best Practices, presents a useful compendium of tips that will help you create a truly stunning dashboard.
Chapter 3, First Things First – The Dashboard Structure, explains how to create the skeleton of an application, including the wireframe, filter pane, and overall dashboard's style.
Chapter 4, It's Not Only about Charts, shows how simple text objects and tables can be the protagonists in a QlikView document.
Chapter 5, Handling "The Classics", focuses on tips and tricks regarding basic visualizations: bar, line, and pie charts.
Chapter 6, Creating Complex Visualizations, brings out the big guns and presents several examples of intricate graphics in QlikView.
Chapter 7, Enhance Your QlikView Experience, helps you define a library of useful resources that will speed up all your developments.
Chapter 8, Before You Go, closes the publication by describing what to do before, during, and after the rollout.
You will basically need a computer with QlikView Desktop, which you can download directly from Qlik's website (http://www.qlikview.com/download). If you want to make the most out of this book, don't forget to also download the additional materials so that you can follow along the exercises.
This book is focused on QlikView developers with a basic knowledge of scripting and layouts who want to improve their designing skills and build effective, eye-catching dashboards that deliver tangible value to their business.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can solve this issue by using the RangeSum function."
A block of code is set as follows:
sum({$<
Type = {'Online Sales'}, Category = {'Books'}
Year = {$(=year(today())-1)}>}
Sales)New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "If you are dealing with a few items, you can keep the legend and use Values on Data Points to be more specific."
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