Monthly Archives: November 2010

Custom formatting table cells

Custom format cellA short tip today about something that actually took me quite some time to figure out: how to easily format table cells. Where in Excel you can just right-click on a cell and choose “Format Cells”, that option seems to be missing in QlikView … or is it? read more »

Prebuilt QlikView Script for Mozilla’s Open Data Visualization Contest

Mozilla Test PilotA few days ago I became aware of the Mozilla Open Data Visualization Contest that is being organized by Mozilla Labs and the Mozilla Metrics Team. The goal of this contest is to creatively visualize answers to the question “How do people use Firefox?”. For example by creating visualizations that investigate interesting usage patterns, reveal interesting user behavior, or explore browser performance.

I figured this would be a nice challenge, so I decided to download the data and load it into QlikView. Since I am always curious to see what other people can do with QlikView (it can be very educational) I have shared my load script and data cloud here, so that other developers interested in joining the competition can get a running start. read more »

Options for geographical analysis in QlikView

With over 80% of data* having a spatial component,Geographical analysis in QlikView geographical analysis can add a powerful new dimension to almost any reporting environment. In the coming time I intend to review the various methods of extending QlikView with geographical analysis capabilities, describing how to apply these methods and what their pro’s and cons are.

Read on to see the options I have identified so far. read more »

Rainy Sunday QlikView blog round-up

Rainy dayIt’s a rainy Sunday here in the Netherlands, a good time to catch up on some reading and share with you some of the QlikView-related blog posts, articles and discussions that I found interesting in the past week.

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QlikView Labs: first look at the Universal Touch Client

A quick pre-weekend post. Yesterday, QlikTech’s QlikView Labs released a demo of their Universal Touch Client project. This project aims to test a fast and touch friendly web-based client running on a variety of touch enabled devices. The first version of the client is available to test on the iPad. If you don’t have an iPad, the demo will also work on Safari or Chrome on your desktop.

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I tested the Universal Touch Client on an iPad and must say that I was impressed. It works a lot smoother than the iPad app and offers the advantage of displaying multiple objects at the same time, this lets you focus on the entire picture instead of focusing on only one facet at a time.

This client also successfully solves the two main drawbacks of opening a QlikView document in Safari via AccessPoint; selecting multiple values (though that has been somewhat resolved in QlikView 10) and making selections in charts.

All in all, this demo looks very promising. I am pretty sure that this client will quickly become the preferred method of consuming QlikView applications on tablet/mobile devices once it becomes available. Hopefully we won’t have to wait until QlikView 11.

Visualizing customer profitability with a whale curve

Do you know if your customers are profitable? All of them? Performing Customer Profitability Analysis can answer these questions and give you some amazing, and sometimes counter-intuitive, insights into your customers’ contribution to your bottom line.

This post describes one of the visualizations that you can create once you possess accurate data* on the profitability of your customers: the whale curve.

In a whale curve, customers are ranked by profitability, from highest to lowest, on the X-axis while their accumulated profit is plotted on the Y-axis. The curve that results can, with some imagination, be said to look like a whale coming out of the water. An example of a whale curve chart is shown below.

Whale curve example

When you look at this chart, you may notice that the top 200 customers generate the bulk of the profit.  You may also notice that the you are losing serious money on the bottom 100 customers and that the customers in the middle are more or less break-even.

Read on to learn how to create a whale curve in QlikView. Even if you’re not interested in creating a whale curve, you might still want to read on to learn more about the rank function and the continuous x-axis. read more »

Portable QlikView: run QlikView Desktop from your USB drive

Run QlikView Portable from USB driveAs a consultant, one thing that I have really come to rely upon is my collection of Portable Applications. Until now, the only thing that was missing from my toolbox was a portable version of QlikView Desktop. Not anymore though. This post will show you exactly how you can create a portable version of QlikView Desktop that you can take with you on your USB drive and run wherever you want. read more »

QlikView 10 blog & resource round-up

QlikView 10 blog round-up

It’s been a few weeks since QlikView 10 was released and a lot has been written in the mean time. In this post I will list the articles, blog posts and resources that I found the most useful while learning about QlikView 10’s new features and functionality. read more »