Geo… what?

One of the most significant changes Qlik has experienced so far is the substantial growth of their product family. What once was a one-man show, is now a robust portfolio that addresses several business needs. Do you want pixel-perfect reports? Here’s NPrinting. You don’t like in-house deployments? Meet Qlik Sense Cloud. Do you need more data? Welcome to Qlik DataMarket. All these new modules help us work more efficiently, enrich our analyses, and ultimately, make better decisions.

One of the most interesting newcomers in this list is Qlik GeoAnalytics (formerly known as Idevio). Even though it isn’t exactly new, I think there are still some misconceptions around this product. Yes, it is a tool that allows you to create cool maps in Qlik, but there’s much more to it. In this post, I’ll show you some of my favorite features and how they can help you analyze geographic data. This might not be a comprehensive list, but hopefully it will give you an idea of the real potential behind GeoAnalytics.

Just Qlik it: Simple Maps

Today’s ‘Just Qlik it’ focuses on using simple maps in QlikView. I’ve been playing with this kind of objects in Qlik Sense recently and I thought it would be good to remember how we created these cartographic visualizations in the old days.

As the ancient masters taught us, before Qlik Sense, GeoQlik and custom extensions, there were scatter charts…

Tutorial

An easy way to create maps in your applications is to exploit the Google API. As always, the reference material with all the examples is here.

1.- Paste the ‘Google Maps’ tab in your script

2.- Be sure to create the fields for Longitude and Latitude in your data model. If you don’t have this information, you can manually find it online (hahaha) or you can search it within your QV script with a routine like this one: