I thought QlikView was supposed to be easy to learn

[#1]

Hello Everyone,

Of course I'm a newbie not only to this product but from a technical perspective BI in general. I'm not finding this product to be user friendly at all. Perhaps it's just the newness of it all but I'm wondering did anyone else fell this way at the start?

[Anonymous]

It depends on your BI and SQL background. I was able to demo a Sales application within 24 hours. But others I work with took considerably longer, primarily with the scripting. You'll get it, then you'll fall in love!

[johnw]

Brian wrote:It depends on your BI and SQL background.

Good point there. I have a decent SQL background, but not a BI or interface-design background. My main prior experience was as the guy designing and/or coding the complicated background pieces of software, not the front end part that the users are dealing with. So I very quickly had data loaded in and was making some basic charts, and even writing some macros, but it took some book reading and some practice before I was producing things like professional-looking dashboards.

[#4]

I'm also new to this, and I'm gobsmacked by the lack of clarity.

I've got a lovely .csv of data. (International cricketers by country, date of birth etc etc, for those who are interested in analysing the impact of birth month on sporting success!). I'd like to use it to test out Qlikview

I expected to be able to find a button marked 'upload data', then to be able to dive immediately into sorting, averaging, showing means, subtotals, comparing one country against another and so on. I'm (a) stuck at first base - can't even work out how to upload the stuff and therefore (b) I'm not using it. You could add (c) clearly v stupid, but something feels wrong! I'm an experienced excel user, so if I'm stuck, I'm guessing that Qlikview is losing approx 75% of the sales it could be getting. Key indicators for you to check:

1) What is your conversion rate of trials to sales?

2) What is your conversion rate of trial downloads to using more than twice?

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I haven't looked at the video tutorial. My excuse? I haven't got an afternoon to spare, and I can get on with things on excel for the moment. I'm aware this will sound wimpish, but if there are lots of products saying 'you just need to invest 2-3 days to get the basics' then I will simply wait until one of them gets easy enough to use out of the box... comments welcome

sincerely

A Late Adopter

[#5]

I have about 3 years experience of using QlikView but as with John above, I don't remember it being too difficult to get moving on it, and I was immediately faced with existing complex load scripts to understand.

I am, to say the least, not a QlikView evangelist but I do believe that the product is very easy to implement and it is possible to have applications up and running in a couple of days.

As for the point above, loading data from a CSV into qlikview could not be easier, I have just done it and not counting the saving of the qvw application it took precisely 8 mouse button clicks! I'm not sure I have ever used an application that makes life that easy.

I do of course accept that I am speaking now after 3 years of experience, however, one thing I did do at the start was to look through the tutorial (briefly) and hand pick a couple of the training videos to watch. I'm not sure there are many applications out there where you can get stuck in and produce something meaningful without allocating some time to learning, you seem to be forgetting that you are using Excel because you have some experience with it, and therefore it's easier.

So......... what does "out of the box" really mean?

If I can get data from a dat source into Qlikview in 8 clicks of the mouse, is that not "out of the box".

I agree with John, there are issues with QlikView, but ease of use and "getting started" is most certainly not one of them.

[#6]

Your points are valid and worth noting. However, I would encourage you to review the getting started online tutorials as they are critical in gaining a basic knowledge of how QlikView works. I too was exactly where you are initially and the tutorials helped quite a bit. While QlikView may be "easy" to learn the basics, a greater degree of effort and experience is needed to gain an advanced level of understanding of the power behind this tool. Unfortunately the marketing behing QlikView tends to wieigh heavily on the ease of use, time to value and overall simplicity from both the end user and developer perspective comparative to other products on the market.

Best of luck!

[#7]

And just for completeness, the sequence to do it is:

1. Open QlikView

2. Click on Load script icon (or press Ctrl-E, or go to Menu-Edit Script)

3. Click on Table Files

4. Locate & select you CSV file

5. Click on Finish

6. Click on OK

7. Click on Reload Icon (or press Ctrl-R or go to Menu-Reload)

It will ask you to save the file if it doesn't already have a name, then you have the data.............

[Anonymous]

QlikView IS very easy to learn compared to other BI products. But, the manual is not well written and the steps to creating your first document are not clear, certainly not obvious to a non BI user. If it had a start-up Wizard that would be a great improvement.

When I loaded my first data I DID have to read a little in Help in order to understand what I needed to do. However, once I figured that out and had used the Layout>Select Fields function, I quickly learned that QlikView is by far the fastest and easiest dashboard tool. It took another search through Help to figure out how to calculate averages, sums, counts, percentages, etc., in Chart objects. Once again, though, after creating the first one I was blown away at how easy is was. My first Doc took two days to create from QV install to sharing with others.

After working in QV for 2.5 years, I'm still trying to figure out many of the advanced features. I often refer to the manual but occasionally I've had to get expert help for thorny problems.

[johnw]

gilesslinger wrote:I'm also new to this, and I'm gobsmacked by the lack of clarity...
I'm an experienced excel user...
if there are lots of products saying 'you just need to invest 2-3 days to get the basics' then I will simply wait until one of them gets easy enough to use out of the box...

I do think I understand exactly where you're coming from. I downloaded an evaluation version of Tableau, just out of curiosity for how it compared. I briefly glanced through some of their sample applications, failed to grasp in less than 5 minutes how to load in my own data, and moved on. I never got it working, and the trial period expired. I'm willing to bet that Tableau is no harder to use than QlikView. But I didn't NEED to learn how to use it, so since I couldn't learn it in 5 minutes, I gave up. I'm sure there are people evaluating QlikView having the exact same experience. Some of those people probably do represent lost sales opportunities.

Excel IS an excellent product, and the "BI tool" of choice for a large number of companies. It has been around forever, and it has had lots of time to get things right. Many of us have grown up on spreadsheets, so they just "feel right" to us when using them. But I'm also pretty confident that if you took someone that had never used spreadsheets before, and sat them down in front of Excel, they would not find it "easy enough to use out of the box". It would probably take them two or three days of experimentation, reading or instruction to figure out what was going on, and it would take them much longer than that to master the product.

So I don't think the learning curve of QlikView is much different than that of Excel. Both are excellent products. Both take a few days to get the hang of them. Just most people invested those few days in Excel so long ago that it may seem like something they've always known, something entirely natural.

Now MAYBE BI tools will eventually reach your standards of "easy enough to use out of the box". Certainly ease of use is something everyone is working on, and would like to improve in their products. Let's say they finally get it just that easy after ten or twenty more years, kind of like the evolution of the word processor or spreadsheet from very clunky to the smooth products they are today. Companies that wait ten or twenty years to adopt BI because it's not "easy enough to use out of the box" are wasting an excellent opportunity to improve themselves. All it takes is a little investment in their future.

[#10]

Nigel, great reply, thank you.
And to all the other respondents, it;s been very useful to hear your views. Thank you for the encouragement and suggestions, and I will give it another go..!

[stevedark]

Hi there,

Regarding the comment that it would be good to have a wizard for going from a standing start this is being added in QlikView 10. I have recorded a video of it in action which can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/acCUEp .

There is also another video on my YouTube channel that looks at sourcing data from a web site in just a few clicks.

Hope these videos are of assistance.

Regards,
Steve