Posted by Juan on 22/12/2009 under Articles, How To | 
For a long time one of the hottest discussions in the BI arena has been the concept of Enterprise BI vs Departmental BI, Top-down approach vs Bottom-up, Pragmatism vs Idealism. In this corner we have Spreadmarts, spreading like a virus throughout the organization to provide a quick and dirty fix to the desperate need of end users for timely information out of IT databases…..and in the other corner we have multiyear, multimillion Enterprise Data Warehouse initiatives that focus first on creating infrastructure, BI governance committees, data integration, while end users keep waiting for the very much needed information.
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Posted by William on 04/11/2009 under How To |
A common data mining method is Market Basket Analysis. This method checks what kind of items are being sold in combination with other products. It delivers insight in buying behavior which helps to make better deals and, for example, bargain discounts. A famous example discovered this way is the cross selling of beer and diapers in supermarkets. The reason: after the birth of a baby it’s often the father who is buying diapers. Because company know more about their customers trough the use of credit and customer cards, useful information is ready to pick up. The good news: it’s actually quite easy to implement this method in Qlikview.
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Posted by Juan on 27/09/2009 under How To |
In this post I want to share with you a good practice in handling the various expressions that exist in a QlikView document. The most used expressions are the ones used in charts, where they hold measures such as Sum(Sales), Sum(Price*Quantity), etcetera. These are the ones more likely to be reused by other objects and in different sheets. There many other expressions including Chart Attributes, Color Expressions and Show Conditions, you can see them all by going to the menu Settings/Expression Overview. Read more of this article »
Posted by Gilles on 10/09/2009 under How To |
Yesterday I was at Qonnections BeNeLux. Very good seminar and very well organized. I had a lot of fun! During one of the presentations about the new features the new search object and the tree view were mentioned (also trellis and minicharts, dynamic chart backgrounds and the updated Actions, if you’d like a post about that, drop a comment). They both triggered me, the search object because in my dashboards I always dropped all relevant fields as list boxes to be able to search for what I want, the tree view is something I come across quite often when people want to drill in hierarchies like products or organisations.
First the Search Object. Read more of this article »
Posted by Juan on 16/08/2009 under Articles, How To |
When working with QlikView documents we bring data by editing the script (usually through wizards) and pressing the reload button.
Have you tried to quickly see the contents of a table you’ve just loaded right after executing the reload? I happily found out the new QlikView 9 includes a feature to preview the contents of a table, directly from the table viewer.
In the meantime we just have to create a tablebox to see the contents of a table, which is not a big deal (it takes 4 clicks). But there are also other features that have been included in QlikView a long time ago that give you very useful information about the data being loaded, at a glance.
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Posted by William on 24/07/2009 under How To |
This how to will describe how to setup user defined buckets. The biggest difference with predefined buckets (last how to post) is the flexibility for the end-user who can choose a variable bucket width.
I will stick with the same example: a database contains a table with data of people. The table contains an age field. The thing we want to do is divide all ages in groups with a variable bucket width:
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Posted by Gilles on 03/07/2009 under How To, Nice Reads |
There is a nice read on a new feature in Qlikview 9 by Jay Jakosky. It’s about “Set Modifiers with Implicit Field Value Definitions” where he gives a nice explanation of how this feature can be used. You can read it here
Posted by William on 26/06/2009 under How To |
What-if scenarios can be useful in many cases. The sales driven organization for example, can take advantage of understanding the impact of rising costs, decreasing quantities of sold goods, changes in selling prices and how all of this affects the margin, just in a few simple clicks. It’s quite simple to create such a what-if scenario in Qlikview. This how to gives you a step by step explanation.
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Posted by Juan on 10/06/2009 under How To |
In my last post I shared a macro to turn on/off the property move/resize on every object in a QlikView document. Manually unselecting this checkbox for every object can be a time-consuming and frustrating task especially if we are dealing with a document with several sheets and sheet objects.
Later on I received a comment from Jonas Valleskog suggesting the use of themes to achieve the same result, so I decided to play a little bit with the feature. It turned out to be a great way of automatically setting properties across a QlikView document, thanks Jonas!. The wizard is intuitive and very powerful, although we need to understand how it works to be able to control which specific properties are changed when applying the theme.
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Posted by Juan on 06/05/2009 under How To |
Among the tasks related to preparing a QlikView document for a production environment, there is one that tends to be underestimated: fixing the position and size of sheet objects. If the user interface is large enough (lots of sheets packed with objects, some of them hidden), manually changing the object properties one at a time can be a daunting task!
More often than not, it is irrelevant or misleading to allow the end user to move/resize objects such as list boxes, multiboxes, inputboxes, current selections and text objects. There is an option to automate fixing the objects: in QlikView Server Management Console / General we find a checkbox “Disallow moving and sizing objects” which is a switch that turns off this setting for all documents. Read more of this article »