This past week, with all the focus in Orlando for Qlik Connect, I decided to spend some time giving a dashboard in one of our existing demos a makeover. Given all the new capabilities that have been introduced recently, I was excited to see what I could create. Let me walk you through how I completed this dashboard makeover.
The Original
Let’s face it, the original dashboard was boring. It was just a plain, functional dashboard with no “Wow“ factor. My goal for this makeover was to add some character to the dashboard.
Step 1: Find a color palette
The color palette that I decided on was on the green scale. Here are the colors that I used:
Sheet Background: #3d6666
Chart Background: #578080
Font color: #ffffff
Step 2: Change the sheet background color
In Edit Sheet mode, click on the sheet background to open up the Sheet Properties panel
Select Styling from the Sheet Properties panel
Toggle off the Background – Auto icon to show Custom
Select the Background color dropdown and enter the hex code that you would like to use
Step 3 – Chart Styling
Much of the work is done this section. The way I approached this was to style one chart and then use the copy/paste style function to bring the other charts to life with the new chart properties.
Note: When copy and pasting styles between chart types, there may be some additional editing needed to update all the chart characteristics. I started with the Profitability by Clinician bar chart.
First, we need to change the bars to white by selecting it in the Properties Panel > Colors and Legends
Next, we need to edit the other chart properties by opening the Styling Properties
We make the changes in the General section first.
Change the text color of the Title, Subtitle, and Footnote: #ffffff
Change the background color to our new chart background color: #578080
Change the color of the border to the sheet background color: #3d6666
Change the corner radius to 7px
Change the shadow to medium
We now need to make the same changes to the Chart section
Change the text color of the Axis Title, Axis Label, Value Label, Legend Title, Legend Label to #ffffff
Here is our new chart after the changes:
Next we need to copy/paste the new style to all of the charts by right clicking on the chart and selecting Copy Style.
Next, we right click on the chart where we want to paste the style and select Paste style
Once we update the characteristics of each chart, we will add grid containers to help us to layout each section of the dashboard and add in the corresponding charts to each section.
After all of the visualizations are added to the grid containers, we now have a new and improved dashboard.
Summary: With just some small changes to our color scheme and chart properties, we were able to completely transform our dashboard. With all the new features, chart types, and chart properties available to the Qlik Sense developer, the only limit to customizing a Qlik Sense app is your own imagination.
Gotta be honest, I'm not in love with either one. I can't tell what requires my focus - everything is the same color and there's no indication whatsoever of whether anything is off target, on target, requires action, etc. In favor of the new design, it no longer contains that attention-grabbing pink-red block. With all the text being the same color, though, I no longer have the sense that some things are more on-target than others (which I assumed was encoded by black vs. teal in the first version).
For what it's worth, I feel like the teal background is just too much in general. Maybe a less eye-grabby color...