topic Re: Is it time to replace the Quick Chart Wizard? in QlikView

Is it time to replace the Quick Chart Wizard?

stephencredmond — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:08:49 GMT

Hi All,

I have been contemplating the Quick Chart Wizard in QlikView recently.

Creating charts in QlikView is very easy once you have a reasonably good grasp of the properties and where everything is. However, for "business" users, this is not always simple. Enter the Quick Chart Wizard. My experience, however, is that the output of the Quick Chart Wizard is almost never an immediately usable chart - you almost always have to then go into the properties to clean it up.

There are, I believe, only a couple of options that need to be set in the Wizard to make it produce immediately usable charts almost all the time. And while we are at it, why not do away with a "Wizard" at all and just have everything visible on one page with a preview of what you are building.

Here is my proposed solution:

What do you think?

Design reasoning:

Dimensions - only 2 (instead of 3 in current Wizard). Vast majority of charts will have 1 dimension. 3 is a rarer requirement so remove from Quick Wizard.

Expression - Only one option (as per current Wizard). Added option to label the expression.

Chart options - reduced to 4 of the most common used (removed Pie and Guage from existing Wizard). Give options on Orientation and Mode (which grey out if not relevant)

Titles - not available in current Wizard but something that users will almost always want to change.

Sort by: I never create a Bar chart that I don't specify a sort order on, so this should be available as an option.

Dimension Limitations: With bar charts, this is something that I probably do more often than not.

Preview Window: Show the user exactly what they are building as they are building it.

I am really interested in all opinions on this. Does anyone think that the existing Wizard has value?

Regards,

Stephen

Re: Is it time to replace the Quick Chart Wizard?

johnw — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 23:39:09 GMT

There's a quick chart wizard? There's a quick chart wizard! The things I don't know about QlikView could fill a book.

It has no value to me, but I suspect it would be pretty useful to people who are new to the system. I do prefer your solution to the current wizard. Yours isn't so much a wizard, in the sense that everything is selectable at once, but that's my preference. Kind of like when I create a new chart, I pretty much hit "OK" before doing anything, and then fill everything in from the properties window instead. I'd prefer it just pop up the properties window directly rather than trying to make me build it step by step. Maybe that's in user preferences somewhere, but I didn't notice it.

Anyway, yeah, looks good.

Is it time to replace the Quick Chart Wizard?

stephencredmond — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:04:14 GMT

Thanks John,

I have a similar method when creating charts except I will probably go through the first 3 steps - to add expressions - and then hit OK before going back in to set the other properties. Very rarely go past the expressions step because I don't want to step through property pages that I don't want to change before I get to "Number".

Regards,

Stephen