QlikView blog round-up: Intellectual Curiosity & QVExcel

By Barry Harmsen

QVExcelAs I’ve been seeing many interesting QlikView articles and blog posts appear recently, I’ve decided to make the Blog Round-up a (bi-)weekly item on this blog. This week, there were two articles that caught my interest:


Intellectual Curiosity…Can QlikView Change Corporate Culture?

An interesting post by Shawn Helwig of Wipfli in which he suggests that legacy report-driven BI-environments, with their inflexible reports and long wait times, may be killing intellectual curiosity within organizations.

Though, like Shawn, I have not done any formal research in this area, I too have noticed this phenomenon in multiple organizations I worked in. Often business questions cannot be answered by standard reports and the delivery of ad-hoc reports takes too long. When this happens for prolonged periods, users either stop asking questions or turn to a member of the “Shadow IT-Department”, Excel Power-users that extract data from existing reports (or have managed to get hold of a dataset, that may or may not be correct) to create their own reports. Neither situation is especially desirable.

Shawn suggests that tools like QlikView might help re-invigorate a culture of intellectual curiosity, because they let people interact directly with the data and answer questions in a flexible manner. I agree with Shawn on this subject and have already seen it happen in places. Tools like QlikView, with their simple interface, can go a long way to fulfilling the promise of self-service BI and renewing intellectual curiosity.

Create Reports and Spreadsheets in Excel from Your QlikView Data

This week, Industrial Codebox launched QVExcel, an Excel add-in for building reports using data from your QlikView applications. This blogpost, over at the Qlikster Blog describes the use-case for this add-in and provides a high-level tutorial.

I tested the beta version of this add-in some time ago and was quite impressed with the ease of use and tight integration with Excel. Personally, I think that Excel-integration should be part of the core QlikView offering. As QlikTech already acquired Industrial Codebox’ QlikView Workbench and Webparts products earlier, it may not be an unrealistic thought to think that they may be picking up this product as well.