[Article] Can Qlik Answers read structured data?

[igoralcantara]

Good day Qlik Community,

It's me again (not Mario, but Igor). Contrary to what my initials say (Alcantara, Igor) I am not an AI but I do like AI. If you read my previous articles in Data Voyagers(BLOG | Data Voyagers), you know that I writing about my experience with Qlik Answers. This is another one of those.

In theory, and that is what I have being telling customers, Qlik Answers only works with unstructured data. However, the 2nd most common question I answer is "can Qlik Answers reads structured data like Excel or CSV?"(the first is: "Can I export to Excel?").

Well, this time I decided to test it and to explore how I could make the impossible, possible.

It is all here. I hope you all enjoy it. If so, please like it and share it.

Can we make Qlik Answers talk to Excel? (datavoyagers.net)

[paulcalvet]

Hello,

It works and it doesn't work, it depend on the question.

I create an automation that extract sales, qty, sessions, avg basket for different brand/country by year in a markdown format.

It works if your questions correspond exactly to the data.

For example :

• if I ask "what is turnover for Brand1 in France" -->  it will be ok.
• If I ask "what is turnover in Europe for Brand 1" --> the result will be partial, because Qlik Answer split the data, sort it, and select it.

I think it's a good way to include master data, but not for transaction.

Regards

[random_user_3869]

Hello @igoralcantara  i really thank you for the great work.

Although i have an issue regarding the md file and how KB Qlik answer reads it 

Here i have the review saying that there is 78 pages 

But when i analyze the MD files in fact it xcontains 91142 caracters so 456 pages (if we round it to one).Do you know how does qlik answer count the caracters regarding MD. Is it a calculation per row or something else ?

[jinwang]

Hello there, 91142/2000 would be around 46 pages, giving some other chars and linebreaks of paragraphs, it become 78 pages won't be a surprise I guess.

[igoralcantara]

Markdown in fact produces more pages than PDF. I wrote an article where I analyze this problem:

Making Qlik Answers Smarter: The Art of Text Parsing and Data Prep