Thursday 19 July 2012

Lose the Legend in Line Charts

I read an interesting post this morning by Gregor Aisch entitled Doing the Line Charts Right.

One of the features that he mentions is about labeling the lines rather than having a legend.  This is not a feature that we have natively in QlikView, but it is achievable.


The "default" option in QlikView is to have a legend in the line chart.  The problem being that the user has to look to the legend then look back to the chart - which can cause difficultly, especially as the number of lines increases.

To change this, we can make use of the Value on Data Point option and using Dual in the expression.

Here is the expression that I am going to use:


 Dual(
 If(MonthYear=Max(total MonthYear), CategoryType, ''),
 Sum(Sales)
 )


Then I enable the Value on Data Point option (which you wouldn't normally apply to line charts).  The value that will be displayed is the Text in the dual, not the number (also make sure that the number format is "Expression Default") which will be blank except for the last point.  Then we end up with this:


Just what I was looking for.


Stephen Redmond is CTO of CapricornVentis a QlikView Elite Partner
Follow me on Twitter: @stephencredmond

Tuesday 17 July 2012

Announcing the QlikTips App

A couple of interesting things happened today.

First, I noticed an interesting tweet from my good tweet-buddy, Matt Fryer, with a link to his QlikView Addict Blog post announcing that his blog is now available on Amazon Kindle.

Later in the day, I was talking QlikView with a client in Northern Ireland and he happened to mention about a friend of his who works for a cool company called JamPot, based in Belfast.  Now JamPot really have one product but it is a cool one - The App Builder.

With the App Builder, anybody who can wield a mouse can, literally within minutes, create their own app to run on various smart phones and tablets.  For free, your app is produced in HTML5 to run on most browsers.  For a slightly more commercial price, you can have your app on the various App Stores and Markets.

I seemed serendipitous that Matt should post about his blog going on Kindle and that I learned about AppBuilder on the same day, so I got to work and produced:

     The QlikTips App

I am sure that you will agree that it is a stunningly crafted application.

Save the App to your home screen so that you can have access to all my brilliant blog posts and my stunningly insightful and witty tweets in one handy location.

Did I mention that it is free?

Even if you can't possibly fit one more App on your home screen, do check out the App Builder.  Well worth a play.


Stephen Redmond is CTO of CapricornVentis a QlikView Elite Partner
Follow me on Twitter: @stephencredmond