Assistance Needed with QlikSense Visualizations Export to PowerPoint Using NPrinting

[ranidas]

Hi Team,

I am currently facing a few challenges with exporting visualizations built in QlikSense, specifically pivot tables, to PowerPoint using NPrinting. I have conducted some research and would appreciate your expertise on the following:

1. It appears that exporting pivot tables directly to PowerPoint is not supported. Even with formatting and customizations, the process seems to be constrained. Based on my understanding, the recommended approach is to utilize Excel templates for the export. Could you kindly confirm if my understanding aligns with your knowledge?

2. Within PowerPoint templates, I've encountered an issue where the header's width, height, alignment, and font properties are being inherited by data rows incase of straight tables. Is there a method to apply customizations separately to the header and data rows within the template?

3. Another concern for e.g tables displaying product country-wise sales. Ideally, the product should only be visible once, with data merging when presenting information for multiple countries associated with the same product. Do you have any recommendations or best practices for achieving this?

versions :
QS May 2022 & Qlik Nprinting May2022 SR3

Your assistance on these matters would be highly valuable. Thank you in advance for your time and expertise.

@Ruggero_Piccoli  @Lech_Miszkiewicz  

[Lech_Miszkiewicz · Accepted solution]

Hi @ranidas 

1. Exporting pivot tables is supported. What is not supported is retaining of formatting of pivot tables when exporting. Only layout and data is exported. Use of Excel based pivot tables within Power Point will not work as there is no support of excel pivot table directly in Power Point via nprinting (it is important to say that this approach will work weel directly in excel though, but not in Power Point!). 

2. Power point table formatting is based on Power Point table styles. Those are not NPrinting properties so we have not much control directly in NPrinting. If you wish to use custom style you would need to create one first and use it to create your template. The trick is that Power Point by default does not have a feature of creating and storing such template and hence you would need to "hack it": https://www.brandwares.com/bestpractices/2015/07/xml-hacking-custom-table-styles/

With this there are only 2 ways: 

• If you know how many rows your table will produce you can prepopulate them directly in NPrinting with required width, height, text margins, colours etc. Note that width of the column os related to text margins in the columns. In the sample below I am able to hide 2nd column by changing it margins to 0 and then width to 0
• If you dont know number of columns and rows then any additional columns and rows will be formatted as per default first cell width and height

That by itself gives you quite a lot of flexibility. 

Given the nature of Power Point presentation you cannot really expect to have "better" solution as you are restricted by slide size and dynamic nature of Pivot Table goes against it. Obviously you will not be able to nicely build a report which one day has 3 columns and another day there is 30 or 31 columns. I have seen such attempts where people tried to put day namber as a column in a pivot table to track daily sales in current month. That is just poor design and there is nothing we can do about it.

3. Yeah - this is a problem and the only workaround I found was by faking layout directly in Qlik Sense. That requires quite a planning given that I use for that straight table layout where I just fake dimension values with blanks. This means I cannot have dimensions as columns but I have more control over width of columns as those can be brought in individually. See below what I am doing. I know it is not ideal, but it does what I need it to do for me. It is not true merged cell but it mimics look&feel little bit:

That is my 5 cents on that topic

hope this helps.

cheers