Tuesday 16 December 2014

Sway to the Qlik

Microsoft have made their new Sway service generally available on "Preview".

So, what is this Sway?  Really, it is about telling stories - without having to know anything about design or building websites, you can upload some images, type in some text, and publish your story.  Your story is then viewable by any user, on device, in a responsive manner.

For example, witness the rather amusing antics of Flat Tony.

You can have your story go horizontally, or you can have it go vertically.  You can easily arrange things if you don't like the way the system presents them.  More ways of arranging things will be coming on stream quite soon.

Why might this be of interest to a Data Viz professional?  Because stories are what we tell - stories about data.

One of the features of Qlik Sense that most interested me was Stories.  One of the features of Qlik Sense that most disappointed me was ... Stories.  The concept is brilliant - easily snapshot images of my charts and then embed them in a story along with annotations to explain what is happening.  The problem is that I can only share these with other users of Qlik Sense - I can't export them to any other format or push them out on a website to non Qlik Sense users.

There is a logic to these restrictions.  The features of being able to view the charts "live" from within a story would not be available to external users.  OK, that can be an important thing, but is that the most important thing?

Here is something that I built in about 10 minutes using Sway (it may look familiar!):

Food Corp Sales Analysis 2014



It isn't earth shattering, but it wasn't several days of effort either.  I used the Windows Snipping tool to grab the images (apparently I can use APIs to get snapshots too), and just added the text.

The big deal about this link is that you can view it - and you can view it on any device.  And you don't need to have a Qlik Sense license.

I am sure that we will see Qlik Sense Stories evolving over time - this is definitely a direction that I would like to see them going.


Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.
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Friday 12 December 2014

Season's Greetings

This QlikView script may be the most important one that you ever see (or not, mostly not).

Follow these steps.

1.   Create a new QlikView application and add the following script:

   For i = 0 to 100 step 5

Tree:
LOAD
RowNo() as id,
1 as Period,
$(i) As Branch,
-100+$(i) as X,
$(i)+10 as Y
AUTOGENERATE (1);

LOAD
RowNo() as id,
2 as Period,
$(i) As Branch,
0 As X,
$(i) As Y
AUTOGENERATE (1);

LOAD
RowNo() as id,
1 as Period,
$(i)+1 As Branch,
0 As X,
$(i) As Y
AUTOGENERATE (1);

LOAD
RowNo() as id,
2 as Period,
$(i)+1 As Branch,
100-$(i) as X,
$(i)+10 as Y
AUTOGENERATE (1);

   Next

      Reload the document.

2.   Add a new Scatter Chart.

3.   On the General tab, set the Title in Chart to:

   =chr(8902)

      In the Title Settings, set the font size to 26 and turn on Bold.
   
4.   On the Dimensions tab, add Period and Branch.

5.   Turn on Advanced Mode on the Expressions tab.  Remove the expressions that have been added and add the following 3 expressions:

   =X

   =Y

   =10+Avg(fabs(X))

6.   Under the first expression, set the following Background color expression:

   =RGB(1, 121, 111)

7.   On the Style tab, select the flat, connected bubbles Look (3rd one down in the 2nd column).

8.   On the Presentation tab, turn off Show Legend.  Add a Reference Line on the X-Axis with a value of 0.  The color should be the same RBG as in step 6.

9.   On the Axes tab, turn off the Forced 0 option and turn on the Hide Axis option for both axes.  For the Y Axis, set a Static Min of -5 and a Static Max of 110.

10.  On the Layout tab, turn off the border (or set to 0 pt).

11.  On the Caption tab, set an appropriate caption.

With a little tweaking (using Ctrl+Shift to move bits around), you should be able to come up with something like this:




Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.
Follow me on Twitter   LinkedIn

Friday 5 December 2014

Searching Questions


I had the privilege recently of visiting Qlik Labs (or "Q Branch", as I like to call it) in London and listened to Alistair Eaves, the Director of Qlik Labs, give a talk on some of the work that they are doing there.

Needless to say, I can't go into the specifics of everything that was said (nothing about laser pens though!) but I can talk about one feature that has made it into Qlik Sense - global search.

I particularly wanted to talk about this one feature because I am not sure that enough has been said about it - probably because most people who are experienced with QlikView might miss the significance of it.

In the Search Object in QlikView, you can enter multiple terms.  It will then highlight where all of those terms might match in the different fields.  There is no concept though about how well those search terms have matched - do they all match, if not how many match?  If I type the query light beer minnesota into the object, then I might get some hits across some fields, but I don't really understand how well I have searched.  I don't know if there is any association between the values that have been found - and Qlik is all about association.


In Qlik Sense, however, the same query gives me far more interesting results.  It gives me qualitative information about how many hits that I have had, what fields I have hit, and how they associate together.  It also gives me information on places where I didn't have exact hits, but still might be very useful to know about.

This might appear to be quite a simple thing, but it is really very powerful.

Users are already used to asking questions of Google to find information.  In the future, they may expect to ask similar questions from their own data to discover insight.  Perhaps even verbally!

Watch this space...


Stephen Redmond is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
He is CTO of CapricornVentis a Qlik Elite Partner.
Follow me on Twitter   LinkedIn