Visual FX in QlikView

By Barry Harmsen

Today’s post comes to you straight from the Department of Useless-But-Fun Stuff.

Many people have seen Hans Rosling’s informative (and very entertaining) presentations in which he uses his Gapminder software to present data in animated scatter plots. With the Animate Dimension function, QlikView offers similar functionality to create animated charts.

Unfortunately, as many have discovered, animating charts in QlikView does not immediately make them informative or entertaining. In fact, the opposite is quite often the case; boring data is presented in an animated form and becomes even more tedious.

Curious to see if I could create an animated chart that, while maybe not informative, at least looks pretty, I decided to create a chart based on Lissajous curves. You can see the result, which uses a standard scatter plot, in the video below. The video contains cheesy music, so check the volume level before pressing play.

Of course, this chart lacks any practical application, but I find that it does look quite cool. Incidentally, this is also the only case in which the use of shiny spheres in a scatter plot is permissible. Should you want to play around with the app, it can be downloaded below.

Download the QlikView Animated Lissajous Curve app

About The Author

Barry Harmsen

Hi there, I'm Barry and I'm a Business Intelligence Consultant at Bitmetric and based in the Netherlands. Originally from a background of 'traditional' Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Performance Management, for the past 10 years I have been specializing in Qlik and a more user-centric form of BI. I have done numerous QlikView and Qlik Sense 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.