Monthly Archives: October 2010

Creating a custom sort order

QlikView offers quite a few ways to easily sort dimensions in your listboxes, tables and charts: by frequency, numeric, text or load order. But what if you want to use a custom sort order that does not follow one of these patterns?

Consider, for example, the following scenario; we have three Business Lines: A, B and C. These Business Lines always need to appear in the order B, A, C. This type of ordering cannot* be achieved by using any of the default sort orders, we will have to create a custom sort order. This post will describe two methods for doing this.

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Moving an object, one pixel at a time

The alignment toolbar offers some excellent options to lay out the QlikView objects on your sheet.

Alignment toolbar

However, sometimes you may want to position your objects in a manner that cannot be done with the standard alignment options. Positioning the objects just right with the mouse is very hard, so consider this alternative: when you select an object and hold down the Control button,  you can use the arrow keys to move the object one pixel at a time. Using Control + Shift lets you move the object ten pixels at a time.

Regular expressions in the load script

Regular expressions (or “regex”) are a developer’s best friend, they offer an extremely powerful way to search for or replace patterns in strings of text.

This post assumes that you already know how what regular expressions are and how to construct them. If this is not the case, then you may want to read up a little bit here before proceeding. Trust me, if you regularly have to deal with validating and cleaning input data then regular expressions are well worth your time.

Data validation and transformation using regular expressions, download the example application

Unfortunately, QlikView does not (yet*) natively support regex, however, there is a way to use regular expressions in your QlikView load script: VBScript. read more »

Deleting script variables

This post was inspired by a gentleman I met at a QlikTech Partner meeting who was adamant that a script variable, once created, cannot be deleted. Of course this can be done, and here’s how. read more »

Decile analysis

Decile analysis is a popular segmentation tool. Where a pareto analysis splits the top 20% customers (or products, regions, etc.) from the bottom 80%, decile analysis divides them into equally sized groups of 10%.

The image below shows an example of a decile analysis.

Decile analysis

The example shows how a group of 1.000 customers is divided into deciles of 100 customers. Lots of interesting things can be learned from this analysis, amongst other things:

  • Your top 10% customers are generating profit that is significantly above average;
  • Your top 30% customers are responsible for 80% of your profit;
  • You are losing money on your bottom 20% customers (the so-called “bleeders”).

So, how do we create a decile analysis in QlikView? read more »

A Russian QlikView user learns of The Qlik Fix!

(ok, so not really ;))

Hello world! The Qlik Fix is here!

Welcome to The Qlik Fix!, a new blog dedicated exclusively to QlikView tips, tricks and tutorials.

I started this blog because I have recently been hearing increasing complaints about the lack of online information about QlikView. Since I have been playing with the idea of starting a QlikView blog for quite some time, I figured now would be a good time to do so.

As a QlikView consultant, I’ve built up an extensive library of QlikView tips, scripts and examples through the years. I plan to share these with you through this blog. At the same time this blog is also a learning experience for me, I am very curious to see your input and hope to learn many new things in the process.

As you can probably tell by the plain vanilla WordPress theme and current lack of content, I am a firm believer in the principle of “Release Early, Release Often“. I hope to ramp up quickly in the coming days and weeks by adding content to the site and customizing the theme and other options.

Check back often, and if you have any suggestions for things you would like to see on this blog then feel free to post a comment or contact me via Twitter (@meneerharmsen).