It's a typical Monday morning at the office. Sara, an executive at HighCloud Airlines, arrives early to begin a busy week. Work has been hectic lately.

Ever since the start of the Euro crisis, the market for air travel and cargo in HighCloud's home market in Europe has been steadily declining. As a result, HighCloud's financial results have also been sloping downward.

A few weeks ago, in an effort to turn the company around, Steve, the CEO, launched an initiative to investigate the company's expansion into other markets. Sara and her team have been tasked with investigating the US airline market. It's a project that, if done well, might really raise the profile of Sara and the team.

Unfortunately, data from many different sources, complicated query tools, and dozens of spreadsheets have made progress slow so far. Even worse, each presentation of preliminary results has triggered a wave of new questions that cannot be answered by the existing reports and analyses. Morale within the team has been steadily dropping and Sara has noticed that Steve is increasingly annoyed by the lack of results.

Unlike the rest of the team, Sara is in an exceptionally good mood this morning. After hearing good things about QlikView, she decided to download a copy of the Personal Edition last weekend. Experimenting with it, she managed to load some data into QlikView and has even created a few charts and tables.

With her laptop under her arm and a smile on her face, she walks confidently into the CEO's office and announces, "Steve, you have to see this."

In this book, we will be following Sara and her team. We will see how they apply QlikView to their business requirements, and how their knowledge and skills, along with your own, evolve throughout the chapters. Each chapter builds on the result of the previous chapter and contains hands-on exercises, along with explanations, background theory, and examples of practical applications.