Book Image

Hands-On Dashboard Development with QlikView

By : Abhishek Agarwal
Book Image

Hands-On Dashboard Development with QlikView

By: Abhishek Agarwal

Overview of this book

QlikView is one of the market leaders when it comes to building effective Business Intelligence solutions. This book will show how you can leverage its power to build your own dashboards to tell your own data story. The book starts with showing you how to connect your data to QlikView and create your own QlikView application. You will learn how to add data from multiple sources, create a data model by joining data, and then review it on the front end. You will work with QlikView components such as charts, list boxes, input boxes, and text objects to create stunning visualizations that help give actionable business insights. You will also learn how to perform analysis on your data in QlikView and master the various types of security measures to be taken in QlikView. By the end of this book, you will have all the essential knowledge required for insightful data storytelling and creating useful BI dashboards using QlikView.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Installing QlikView

Let's dive right in, and download the QlikView application for our use. We will use the following steps to do that:

  1. Our first step is to open the web browser and go to https://www.qlik.com/us/. The following screenshot shows the landing page for the website:
  1. Once you get this, click on Products, and navigate to the QlikView menu item, as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. When you click on the QlikView menu item, you will be redirected to the page shown in the following screenshot, where we will click on the Try It Free button:
  1. This will redirect you to the page shown in the following screenshot, which has a registration form to be filled in:

  1. When you fill in the required details, and click on the Send Form button, it will redirect you to the download page, which contains a User License Agreement that we have to accept. The following screenshot shows the download page:

Once the download is completed, the installation is pretty straightforward. The installation wizard will take you through each step, and the final setup will take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on your system configuration.

Exploring QlikView

Now that we have installed QlikView, let's explore it using a few demo examples that are available. The following screenshot shows the user interface (UI) of the tool:

On the left-hand pane, it shows you the the demo examples that are bundled with the QlikView installation. On the central pane, it will show you a list of recent documents, and on the right-hand pane, it will show you any favorite document you have. So, you may have a lot of recent documents, but very few favorite documents that you want to maintain or develop. So, here you can create, or see, the list of your favorite documents. The bottom part of the UI displays some information, such as the additional learning guides and resources. And, finally, down at the bottom-right of the window, you have the option of creating a new document.

Alright, now, let's go ahead and open up a demo app. Let's open the Retail Store Performance example present in the Examples pane. This redirects you to the dashboard for the app, which looks similar to the following screenshot:

Here, we have a small app, called Retail Store Performance. In this, the Get Started button is present just above the Explore Store Performance column. There are two more columns present there, namely, Analyze Store-level Assortment and Monitor Customer Satisfaction. This is a pre-built app to give you an idea about what kind of apps you can develop, and how they'll look and feel.

So, if we click on the Dashboard tab, it shows us a dashboard view. The following screenshot shows what the Dashboard looks like:

Then, we click on the next tab, which shows the Sales view:

The Store Map shows us the map view. It has a map of all the stores, and the table containing the details of each store. The following screenshot shows what the Store Map view looks like:

The last tab is the Customer Satisfaction overview. This tab contains a summary of all the customer satisfaction scores and surveys conducted by the stores. The following screenshot shows what this tab looks like:

In the Customer Satisfaction tab, the center pane contains some demo charts, and, below that, in the table, metrics have been provided. On the left-hand side, we can see some filters, such as Region, District, and District Manager. These filters essentially sort the information on the basis of whichever value you choose, so that it becomes easy to look at specific information.

For example, if I want to see the Germany region information, I just click on the Germany value, and the information will be filtered for me. Similarly, within the Germany region, if I want to select any district, for example, District 10, then further information will be filtered for me on the basis of the district as well as the region. The following screenshot shows what this looks like:

The best part is that information will be filtered across all these tabs, and the green light on the tab is indicating that the information has been filtered based on the selection made in the current tab.

So, that's a quick introduction of QlikView using a demo app, and how filters impact the multiple colors present in the values. We will look at this in much greater detail later on. We will learn about how we can create these kinds of sheets, and put all of this information into action. In the next section, we will start creating our first document in QlikView.