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Throughout my series of blogs, we have been taking a look at the many charts that Qlik has to offer. From Bar Charts to Scatter Plots, we’ve covered a good portion of the catalog, but today we’ll be looking at an option that can work in conjunction with every chart or sheet; Filter Panes.
Filter Panes display dimension values to enable the precise selection of data. This means that you can design a filter plan, assign it a field and then you can filter your data through that field. Let’s look at a few examples to better understand what filter panes can do and how they can transform, learn, make discovers and answer questions about our data, sheets, and visualizations!
Here we have a screenshot of the Overall Equipment Efficiency app on the Qlik Demo site.
The purpose of this set of treemaps is to visualize Breakdown by Machine and Breakdown by Cell, as shown by their titles. As we can see, these treemaps are comprised of many intersecting data values, such as the machine, the type of machine, the shift type, and time frame.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes, or work boots, of a factory manager. While this would be great for getting an overview of how the machines we’re responsible for are running, we might want a more specific picture, filter panes would be a great solution.
By adding a few filter panes to the sheet, we can drill down to our desired data. Let’s say we only want to view the Rolling machines, during the afternoon shift, with two clicks, our data has been filtered down and our three rolling machines are on display.
Diving even further, we can select the time period, such as February of 2023.
Again, our visualizations will update to reflect our selections.
One of the great things about filter panes, is that they are not limited to just one selection per filter pane. Let’s say we want to get an idea of how often the rolling machines breakdown compared to the forming machines, we can do that with filter panes!
With these selections made, we can quickly gather two insights. The first is that we only have three rolling machines compared to the five forming machines. Next, we can see that three of the forming machines are over 75% efficiency, whereas only two-thirds of the rolling machines are at the threshold. Keep in mind, these selections are not interfering with the app with the selections cleared, if I were to cancel my selections made within my filter pane, the app would return to the original state.
Filter panes also take advantage of the associative selections model.
In the screenshot above, we are given four examples of the associative selection states. We can see that 2023, February, and Forming and Rolling are in a selected state, shown colored green and with a checkmark. Both shift types are white, showing they are possible selections. The light gray for Jan in the month filter pane shows that it could be an alternative selection to the selected Feb. Last, we have the dark gray 2023, to show that that selection has been excluded from our visualization. The associative selections allow for a quick view of the selections made and the data presented, helping users gain insights on their data.
This has been an overview of filter panes as offered by Qlik. If you would like to learn more about how you can customize a filter pane, Jennell McIntire has written blog entries on the new updates for filter panes, and how users can customize their filter panes.