VIWICUMO: Slope Charts

Hello everyone and welcome to QlikFreak, the most reliable blog in the web, with consistent updates and definitely no multi-year hiatus where the author experienced an existential crisis. My name is Julian Villafuerte and yes, I’m still alive. Recently, I decided it’s time to get back to the things I love the most: broidery, newspaper crosswords and birdwatching. But, since it’s getting a little cold outside and I haven’t bought a newspaper in 25 years, I guess I’ll have to resume my blogger career as well.

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VIWICUMO (no, that’s not a typo)

If you’ve been working with data visualization for a while, you’ll know that there are some charts you can never get rid of. Regardless of the industry, audience, or business process you’re analyzing, 99% of the dashboards you deploy will feature tables, bar charts, and line charts. And rightfully so. Those visualizations are super useful, flexible, and easy to use. Most data experts will try to deny it, but even pie charts have a special place in our hearts.

However, there are other visualizations that are equally amazing but tend to run away from the spotlight. Let’s be honest, you’ll never see a violin plot or a scatterplot matrix in the sales report that Karen from accounting has been sending every Thursday since 1985. Maybe it has to do with the purpose they serve, their complexity or the lack of data related skills in our companies, but sadly, these stars don’t shine as bright as the others. For this reason, I decided to create a new series called VIWICUMO: Visualizations I wish I could use more often (patent pending, LOL). To get things started, we’ll discuss the poor man’s line chart, the king of the Δy / Δx, none other than the slope chart.

More things I hate about QlikView

Let me start this post with a question: What is wrong with you people? I was building a little app for analyzing which are your favorite topics in this blog when I came across a sad realization. Even though QlikFreak is full of useful tips about visualization and data modeling, it looks like the most popular post is… well… the one where I complain about everything 😛

In a way, writing this kind of posts is like talking about my problems with someone who really understands, and since I cannot afford a decent therapist, why don’t we put the constructive spirit aside and discuss the details we hate about the platform we love? Here we go: More things I hate about QlikView!

The extra space in listboxes when you use the AJAX client: I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had mixed feelings about the AJAX client. On one hand, it has great features such as notes, session collaboration and the fact that you don’t have to install anything special in order to use QlikView in desktops, laptops or even mobile devices. On the other hand, it slightly changes the size and alignment of the objects, modifies the amount of visible rows in straight / pivot tables and sometimes adds scrollbars to the charts. And well… I really hate unaligned objects in my apps!!! However, the thing that annoys me the most is, without a doubt, that blank space that appears at the end of certain listboxes:

For God’s sake! Why. Are. You. There?!?! Aaaaarrrrghhhhh!!!

Bulk Actions: At some point in our lives, we’ve all wished that QlikView had some sort of bulk actions (you know, a magical “Apply to all” button). For example, let’s say you just finished creating a 10-column straight table and you want to center all the labels.  You go to the Presentation tab and try to select all the expressions but you can’t, so you end up either clicking each column and centering its title or changing the object type to a Pivot Table and doing it all at once (I’m not really sure why this only works for Pivot Tables).

Qlik Demos

Since the beginning of my career as a Business Intelligence Consultant, Qlik’s demo site has been a reliable source of awesome stuff. It is a great way to learn more about KPIs, get some inspiration and borrow useful tricks. Unfortunately, in the last few months, I haven’t seen a lot of activity there. I remember a time when they used to share demos almost weekly!

I know there are a lot of great designers there like Michael Anthony, Arturo Muñoz, Jennell McIntire and Shima Auznis (who is now a partner), so I hope you surprise us with more apps soon! In the meantime, these are my 5 favorite demos:

Expense Management
Clean, balanced and insightful. I often use it as an example in my trainings.

Insurance Demo
Yes, you can create a good-looking dashboard using dark interfaces.

Just Qlik it: Double Gauge

‘Just Qlik it’ is a new section of our blog that focuses on sharing useful components… that kind of objects that are not incredibly complex, but are easy on the eye and convenient to have around.

On our first delivery, I’d like to share a double gauge that gets along pretty well with comparisons between ratios (for example, net and gross margins).

You can easily copy, paste and configure this component by modifying the colors and formulas in the Presentation tab. Just remember that there are two independent gauges and that you should include your formula in the Lower Bound of the second segment.

You might also want to change the Min and Max values allowed. If your numbers are usually between 0% and 30% there’s no need for a gauge that goes all the way to 100%.

[ Download File ]

I often use this kind of representation to highlight the main KPIs of the tab and reinforce them with a detailed table in the lower part of the screen. In the downloadable file, most of the objects are dummies created only to

From QlikView to… Qlik?

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding a little bit difficult to embrace certain aspects of the new brand image that QlikView has adopted.

A fresh color palette has complemented the classic green gradients with warmer colors while a couple of orange circles have filled in for the emblematic QlikView swirls. I think that all these changes have reinvigorated the spirit of the platform, especially because they are aligned to its core values: effectiveness, real business value and simplicity.

To be honest, my only real problem is the transformation of the product name itself. If you recall 1994 (or read this post), in the beginning we used to call our favorite BI tool “Quik View” (maybe not very creative, but representative nevertheless).

After that, the name evolved to QlikView, a designation that is specifically difficult for