an approach that begins with gathering business requirements, then planning the data model, then identifying data sources, and then loading the data into QlikView. The last step is building visualizations.
However, because we believe it’s better to learn simple QlikView techniques before proceeding to more advanced ones, this chapter describes the process of building visualizations before you learn data modeling and scripting. We will cover these topics in Chapters 5 and 6.
For this chapter, imagine that you are a business analyst. You need to build a Sales Analysis dashboard, but you don’t need to know how to load data into QlikView. We’ll assume that you’ve asked the trusted consultants from Natural Synergies to develop a data model, and you’ll use it “as is” for developing the analytic solution.
In the next few sections, you’ll build a simple yet effective Sales Analysis application, and in the process of doing so you will learn the following visualization techniques:
● Developing list boxes and multi boxes to allow user selections
● Building a page outline with text objects and line/arrow objects
● Building simple charts
● Comparing current year-to-date with prior year-to-date and applying other conditions to your aggregations
● Building a professional-looking dashboard
Preparing the Environment and Getting Ready
In this section, you open the template document and make some initial preparations. You will learn about the following:
● Opening and saving QlikView documents
● Utilizing user settings to save your work automatically
● Creating and working with sheets
● Defining colors in QlikView
If you haven’t installed the book’s electronic materials yet, please revisit the Introduction and follow detailed instructions for preparing your work environment for this book’s tutorial. You need to download and install QlikView and Qlik Sense, download our electronic materials, and preferably install our font. We described all the necessary preparations at the end of the Introduction.
Opening a Template Document
The first step in developing any QlikView document is opening the QlikView Developer tool from the Windows Start menu. Going forward, we refer to it simply as QlikView, for simplicity.
QlikView opens with a default start page that provides quick access to Examples, Recent Documents, and Favorites. Other than that, QlikView is a standard Windows application, with the familiar menu, toolbars, and other attributes of Windows applications. QlikView documents can be opened, saved, and managed overall in the same way you manage MS Office documents.
We will highlight now a few specific options within QlikView menus that are important at the beginning. You’ll discover more options when they become relevant to your development.
The View menu offers a few helpful commands that deal with zooming, sizing the window, and other options. You will use the View menu to enable the Design toolbar, which is extremely useful for designing visualizations.
The Settings menu contains User Preferences, Document Properties, and a few other useful commands (some of those commands are only available when a document is opened). For your current purposes, you will use User Preferences to define the Auto Saving settings, which will help you preserve your work in case of any failures. Feel free to browse other settings on your own. We will just mention that Document Properties describe settings for the current document, and they follow the document wherever it needs to go. Conversely, User Preferences store settings that describe your individual preferences as a developer and a user of QlikView. Those settings remain local and apply to all the documents that you work with. In the following exercise you set the user preferences for the sales analysis document that you downloaded for this chapter.
Exercise 4.1: Opening the Sales Analysis Document
1. Open QlikView.
2. In QlikView, open an existing document using the menu command File⇒Open. Navigate to the folder \QlikView Your Business\Apps, and open the document Sales Analysis Template.QVW.
3. Create your own version of the document by using File⇒Save As… and replacing the word Template with your initials.
4. Navigate to the View⇒Toolbars menu and enable the Design toolbar. Now you should see a second row of icons added below the Standard toolbar.
5. Navigate to Settings⇒Document Properties, open the General tab and verify that Sheet Object Style is set to Transparent. In the Presentation tab, verify that Default Theme for New Objects is set to NS_Flat.qvt. If it’s set to [None], navigate to the folder \QlikView Your Business\Resources\Themes\ and select the theme file from there. This might happen if you installed your book materials under a different path.
6. Navigate to Settings⇒User Preferences, open the Save tab, and check the first three check boxes– Save Before Reload, After Reload, and Every 30 Minutes(see Figure 4-1, points 5-7). If your computer should crash for any reason, you will not lose more than the last 30 minutes of your work. Once you open QlikView again, you will be offered a chance to recover the document from the automatically saved copy.
Figure 4-1 presents some of the basic elements of the QlikView environment – the main menu (1), the main toolbar (2), the Design toolbar that you just enabled (3), and the User Preferences window, opened on the Save tab (4), with the three checkboxes that we recommended you check (5-7).
Figure 4-1: QlikView menus, toolbars, and user preferences
Sheets and Sheet Objects
QlikView visualizations are called sheet objects, and they are kept in sheets. By default, each new application is created with a single sheet called Main. Developers can rename the Main sheet and add more sheets as needed for the application. There is no technical limitation to the number of sheets, but it’s advised to keep the number of sheets manageable, to avoid unnecessary clutter.
Creating a new sheet is simple. You can use Layout ⇒ Add Sheet or simply click on the first icon on the Design toolbar. Both options are shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2: Adding new sheets
When multiple sheets exist, they can be moved up or down the list using the Promote Sheet and Demote Sheet options (either in the Layout menu or with the toolbar icons).
New sheets are created with a full set of default properties, inherited from the Document Properties. The properties can be accessed and modified as needed, by right-clicking on the sheet (any empty space on the screen) and selecting Properties from the context menu. For example, the Title of the sheet is the first attribute that you need to change, unless you like using default titles Sheet1, Sheet2, and so on. As an alternative, you can access the Sheet Properties by using the toolbar icon Sheet Properties, located in the
