Excel and VBA: the poor man's QlikView » The Qlik Fix! The Qlik Fix!

Excel and VBA: the poor man’s QlikView

By Barry Harmsen

Today I have something completely different for you. It is only tangentially related to QlikView and lacks any practical application for QlikView professionals, but I know it will make you smile when you see it.

A few years ago I was the technical lead on a project that required the development of multiple Excel dashboards. I designed and developed (together with Nico Wuite, who did a lot of the coding) an Excel plug-in that could be used to generate stand-alone, fully interactive Excel dashboards. I recently rediscovered the plugin after cleaning up my archive of Excel and VBA reference files and thought it would be fun to generate a demo dashboard.

Have a look at the embedded video below (preferably in full screen HD) and see if it reminds you of a certain BI tool Also, keep in mind that this was built before PowerPivot was released, so it is a little dated by now.

About The Author

Barry Harmsen

Hi there, I'm Barry and I'm an independent Business Intelligence Consultant based in the Netherlands. Originally from a background of 'traditional' Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Performance Management, for the past few years I have been specializing in QlikView and a more user-centric form of BI. I have done numerous QlikView implementations in many different roles and industries. In 2012 I co-authored the book QlikView 11 for Developers. You can follow me on Twitter at @meneerharmsen.

10 Comments

danial

March 20, 2011 - 21:45 | Permalink

can u share workbook for ur video?

2

Barry

March 31, 2011 - 22:13 | Permalink

Great to see that there is so much interest in my dashboard. Unfortunately, I will not be able to share the workbook. A lot of time and effort went into it and, although there’s only a slight chance that I’ll actually persue it, I want to keep my options open to release it as a commercial product in the future.

I will however gladly answer any questions about how the workbook works and how certain functionality was achieved. I have no problem sharing some example code. If you have any questions then please put them in the comments section.

March 22, 2011 - 06:53 | Permalink

I too would be interested for source workbook of this video. Please provide it if possible.

Chris Hanson

March 23, 2011 - 19:50 | Permalink

That is a fantastic dashboard. Echo the requests above.

Vendetta

March 25, 2011 - 14:05 | Permalink

Haha!
Amazing!
Qlikview is an excel copycat!

Would be fun to play with it if you want to share.

Gopa Kumar Murali

July 6, 2011 - 10:06 | Permalink

Excellent piece of work.

aileon

January 11, 2012 - 10:02 | Permalink

Lovely, kindly share with me the work book. Mail to ailenetbiz@yahoo.com

kamaal

January 28, 2012 - 23:31 | Permalink

Barry, this is the best ever dashboard i have ever came across, am willing to pay you if you can train me on how to creat a similar one.

Sri

February 15, 2012 - 12:25 | Permalink

This is fantastic Barry, the ideal solution for small business who may not want to spend th 20 or 30 K for QLIKVIEW basic licenses.

Perfect to utilise data from their existing system and EXCEL is the most common spreadsheet in the world ! Brilliant.

Sorin

August 30, 2012 - 20:45 | Permalink

Good video.. great ideea!!!
I’ve worked in QlikView and I’m currently trying to develop a similar dashboard for any type of data. I’ts really hard work… the codes in vba especially.
Great work!
Cheers!