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Throughout the blogs that I have written, I have covered various types of charts that Qlik offers and how to use them. Today we’re going to be looking at not one, but three kinds of visualizations. While you might not be able to call these visualizations ‘charts’ they can still be found under the chart section of Qlik Sense and can be quite useful when visualizing your data.
Buttons
Buttons can be used in many ways such as: toggling a parameter on and off, applying a bookmark, clearing a selection and much more.
How can we use buttons in an app?
Let’s look at one example of how buttons can be used by exploring our Overall Equipment Efficiency app.
Within this app, we’ll find a line chart with various buttons beside it. Using these buttons, a user can select which lines they would like to view, clearing up the line chart to only show one line at a time, or multiple lines for the use of comparison. What these buttons are doing is toggling on and off the measures for the line chart using a variable. These variables are used with the chart to show or hide their OEE line. The text and color of the button can also be influenced by an expression, changing when clicked and dependent on the data being displayed as seen below.
These buttons allow non-author users to interact with the data to display their desired data. Using expressions there are so many ways that authors can make interactable elements using buttons with the only limit being their own creativity. For more information about buttons follow this link here:
https://help.qlik.com/en-US/sense/May2023/Subsystems/Hub/Content/Sense_Hub/Visualizations/Button/but... .
Tables
Tables are wonderful for showing a lot of information in a concise, readable format. This medium is great for showing data with large ranges or differences of only a few decimals.
One of the benefits of tables is to display data in a raw, numerical form, but comes at the cost of a lack of visual appeal. Tables can allow for the filtering of data through an app, allowing a user to select a dimension or measure provided by the table and filter data through the app by that selection.
Tables can be a great way for non-authors to explore data. For example, below we have a table that displays the items in a large grocery store chain along with the Margins Per Item, Quantity, Margin, Cost and Sales for the various items.
How can we use tables in an app?
Let’s say that I work for this company as a merchandise manager. My responsibility would be providing this business with high margin products, while eliminating the low, or negative margin products. Starting with a visualization, I find there are some irregularities with the margins of some of our products. With a table, I can explore the data to begin learning what may be going on.
Through the table, I can see the ‘Best Choice Dried Apples’ is selling at a huge loss, $1713 with only 8 products sold. That’s not good.
Using our table, we can explore further, through a different dimension, this time through ‘Region’ we find a single sale of ‘Best Choice Dried Apples’ that the company has sold at a loss of $13749.60. Someone has some explaining to do. Is this fraud? Is it theft? An accounting error? A mistype when processing a refund? While our table can’t tell us the cause, we can begin to investigate, all thanks to our table.
Tables offer a clear, and concise view of your data, allowing for easy exploration and comparison. If you’d like to learn more about tables and how they can be used in your sheets follow this link: https://help.qlik.com/en-US/sense/May2023/Subsystems/Hub/Content/Sense_Hub/Visualizations/Table/tabl...
KPIs
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator which in terms of Qlik Sense, means a visual way of monitoring a measure. KPIs are useful for when you need to know how a measure is trending, up or down. These visualizations can be customized to show measures as stated above, but also tie the conditions of these measures to certain colors or symbols.
How can we use KPIs within an app?
Here we have an example of a KPI which displays the overall efficiency of a sheet metal manufacturing plant.
This KPI provides a lot of information in a very condensed area. Using only a 6x4 portion of the sheet, the KPI shows which weeks are being displayed, what our overall efficiency is compared to the week before, and which way this measure has gone, in this case down. The colors in this KPI provide us with visual feedback of the percentage. We’ve set any percentage below 70% to show as ‘bad’ or orange, this shows we need some improvement in our efficiency to get back to a satisfactory level.
These KPIs can be influenced by filter panes to display different data. With January selected, our KPI updates to show the correct weeks as well as the efficiency of those weeks.
Here we find that our percentages were higher but were still on a downward trend from the month before. This information could allow us to correct the influences of this downward trend, and we learned about it through a quick glance at our KPI.
So, there are three different assets that you can add to your sheets to make them more dynamic. Which of these assets are you most excited to use in your apps and sheets? What are some ways that you have used Buttons, Tables or KPIs in your own apps? Drop them down in the comments below and get the conversation going.