Tips and Tricks – Pixel Perfect or QlikVew Natural

[Jennell_McIntire]

Have you ever received a design and wonder how you were going to replicate it in QlikView?  Well, I came across this challenge when creating the Social Media Data Analysis demo.  Our UI designer designed a chart that that looked something like the image below:

Now at first glance, you may consider designing this in QlikView using individual text objects for the labels and expressions.  That was my first thought but then I realized that there would be a lot of text objects to maintain when changes were made to the expressions.  So I tried to recreate this chart using a pivot table.  While it was easy to add the dimension and the three expressions, it was a little more difficult to add the perks like a background color for the highest value but only for selected companies.  For example, in the chart below, Company A, Company C and Company D are selected so I only want to see the highest values based on those selections.

There were also challenges like the dimension label and background color or the fact that the background color for Company A Followers extended to the left to the label.  It was little things like this that made this chart a challenge.

But with the use of set analysis, background colors, text color and some carefully placed text objects, I was able to create a visualization that was not as pixel perfect as the Photoshop design but close to it using the basic features and functionality of QlikView.  Read more about how I created this chart in this technical brief.