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)

Creating a document

Here, we will look at the different ways by which we can create a new document in QlikView. We will look at how to save and close a document, and, finally, we will look at how we can reopen the recently-created document. So, let's go into QlikView and see these things in action:

  1. As we saw in the previous section, the New document button, located at the bottom-right of the screen, can be used to create a document for use in QlikView. So, let's go ahead and click on that now:

Another option is to go into the toolbar and click on the first icon, which is New. Yet another option you have is to go into File and click New from the drop-down menu there.

Once you create a new document, the Getting Started wizard will appear and ask you to create a new document. This wizard is divided into multiple categories, such as Data source, Data presentation, Save file, Choose chart type, Populate chart, and Selections. All of these are very standard operations within QlikView. However, once you gain some experience, you will see that this wizard doesn't offer the options that you really want. So, generally, we are going to avoid this. We want to perform all of these operations, but in our own customized way.

  1. Before we save, we will go into the User Preferences settings and uncheck the Show wizard option, as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. We will test this out now. We can see the document name is QV1 by looking at the top of the window. With the shortcut Ctrl + N, we will create a new document, which will be automatically named QV2, as seen in the title pane.

So, these are the various options that you have whenever you are creating a new document, and it is my recommendation that the wizard is not a very good option. This is because there are a number of things that, as a QlikView developer, you need to do, and it's pretty easy to do it in a custom way, rather than following a standard method, as the latter does not allow us to completely utilize all the QlikView functionality that you, as a developer, want to use.

Saving the document

Once we have created a new document, the next option we will check out is saving the document. For that, we again have multiple options.

The first option is to go into the toolbar and press the Save button there, as shown in the following screenshot:

Another option is going into the File menu and clicking Save, or pressing the shortcut Ctrl + S.

So, let's go ahead and click Save. Once we click Save, it will ask you where you want to save this QlikView document. We can save it wherever required, so I will select QV1 and save it.

Once I save it, I am pretty much done, and I can close the window. Whenever we close the document, we need to close the entire application. There are several ways to close the application, similar to opening the document.

Let's go ahead and summarize the topics that we have just covered. We have looked at the different ways to create a new document, we have looked at how we can save and close a document, and then, finally, we have looked at how to reopen a recently-created document. In the next section, we will look at QlikView in depth and its important terminologies.