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Most people who create a QlikView application do so to help analyze their business data. And while business is the main focus when analyzing data, there is an equally important segment of data that gets overlooked and that is personal or recreational data. Many times this data is captured in an Excel spreadsheet and beginner QlikView users might need to know how to load their spreadsheets into QlikView. In this blog I want to run through two scenarios of how I used QlikView to help me analyze some recreational data.
Scenario 1 - In my personal life I am a coach. I coach youth football, basketball and baseball. This past spring, while coaching my son’s 9-10yr old baseball team, I had the grand idea to analyze the team’s game data in QlikView. So, after each game, I took the data that I captured on our scorebook and entered it into an Excel spreadsheet. Each game had its own tab within the spreadsheet. After entering the data in to Excel, I would then load it into QlikView. Once the data was in QlikView, I created calculations that analyzed the productivity of my hitters. I tracked On-Base %, Batting Average, In-Play% and K/AB%.
As the season progressed, and I had more game data to analyze, I started using QlikView to create my batting order. My mindset was that my top on-base hitters batted 1-3, my top in-play hitters batted 4-7, and my weaker hitters batted 8-11. It was a youth version of Moneyball and I was the team’s Billy Beane. So what did all of the data crunching get us? Well, while we averaged over 9 runs per game during the season, we did not win the championship. My next order of business is to see how QlikView can help my team improve our fielding. 
Scenario 2 – As I mentioned previously, I volunteer my time with youth sports organizations. Many of you know that youth organizations are administered by volunteers, many of whom have full-time jobs and families. So any amount of added help is greatly appreciated. Many of these organizations use Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the finances. Trying to analyze that data takes lots of time and energy from volunteers who are already stretched too thin. This is where QlikView can help. QlikView allows the administrators to visualize expenses and revenues to get a better understanding of the money flow within the organization. I helped one youth organization complete this task and it was a real eye-opener to see just how much money was brought into the organization and where it was all spent.
Those are just two ways that I have utilized QlikView to help me analyze recreational data. And for those of you wondering how I loaded my Excel spreadsheets into QlikView, I wrote a technical paper that will explain the process.