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Michael_Reese
Employee
Employee

NPrinting vs CIA Partners QlikView Reporting add-on

Hello, I'm in the process of evaluating these products.

Has anyone else compared these two products directly?

What are there reasons you would recommend one over the other?

Any issues or limitations encountered after purchasing?  Has support been effective and reliable?

Thanks

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
Michael_Reese
Employee
Employee
Author

Hi, I'm the original poster and it's been several years creating this thread.  Today I am partnered with Vizubi, the makers of NPrinting.  The gaps it had early on in its initial releases are long gone.  It is extremely powerful and flexible and has many use cases, including some you haven't thought of yet.

It does have all of the Office export options, plus pdf, image, flat file, email etc. in addition to pixel perfect.  It also has On Demand functionality that allows QV users to generate reports using their own filter selections.  I've even created a solution for On Demand that puts dimensions, expressions and labels in the users' control as well.

I recommend you explore the NPrinting web site and its many helpful tutorials.

If you're interested in a solution provider, I offer implementation and training services.  Feel free to message me if you'd like to pursue partnering with us.

Mike

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21 Replies
Not applicable

Hello,

I'm a french partner and work with these tools.

They are really different:

- With NPRINTING, you work with :

     * PDF reports you created in QlikView

     * Simple Excel reports you create manually as template (included formulas)

  With these PDF and Excel, you can use selections (fields, favorites...), made a simple loop in a field and send to you specific users via email or put in directories

- With QLIKVIEW REPORT MANAGER, you work with:

     * Any Office document you want as template (Excel, Word, PowerPoint), optionally convert it in PDF or HTML

With these documents, you can use selections (fields, favorites...), made a multiple loops in a field and send to you specific users via email or put in directories

If you only need to send QLIKVIEW PDF reports, NPRINTING is enough, but formatting really great templates is impossible with QLIKVIEW PDF reports.

So, I think QLIKVIEW REPORT MANAGER is best to create well designed documents for users, in Word, Excel, PowerPoint... With this tool, you create the design you want for your Office document, have lots of scripting functions if needed, without any limitations. And you can also add rich text comments in your QVW and export it on your reports.

Hope I can be helpful

Regards

Regis

Michael_Reese
Employee
Employee
Author

I've been testing NPrinting and I can see you can loop a report on different fields and distribute, but I'm not seeing a way to split to the looped report for specific users dynamically.

The template functionality definitely surpasses anything offered from QlikTech since it allows you to create Crystal/SSRS type reports in Excel on different sheets or even different workbooks.  You can then have them generated in PDF form from the Excel template, which is a great feature.

However, I'm having a lot of issues with stability and the errors have not been meaningful.  I had an export working last week which will not work this week after applying the latest upgrade.  My qvw is simple and has one chart and it will no longer find it.  At first, i tried renaming the chart, but it still kept seeing the old chart ID, which no longer existed.  I deleted it and added a new and now it doesn't see any charts.  I've tried creating new documents, new jobs, new tasks and it no longer recognizes charts.

Some of the prompts are in Italian.

Regarding CIA Partners product, I have not been able to test it yet, but I've watched the demos.  The impression I got is that you really have to script everything.  I'm not immediately seeing how that would be different from what you can do with the native QlikView macro editor where you would make API calls to other applications.  I'll have a demo Monday to get any remaining questions answered.

I'll actually have a demo on both products so if anyone has any other specific questions, let me know and I'll try to follow up.

Thanks

Not applicable

Hello,

you can dynamically distribute to a specific user with nprinting, I think so. You true, that's better than QlikTech but with Excel, you have limitations. For example, a customer tells me: I wan't to create an Excel report with a table, with background and formatting that cannot be done with QlikView object. With NPrinting, you have to define cells but you can't handle formatting after export, or you have to use macros, which is not clean in production ways.

I don't have upgrade issues you are talking to. About the prompts in Italian, I think it could be fixed easily.

About CIA product, you have different tasks: Excel object merge export is simple, no need to make scripts, you only have to define named call with same ID as in QlikView. That's as simple as NPRINTING.

But for more complex Word/PowerPoint/Word documents (there's no way to do it with NPRINTING), you need to make some scripts, but that's really simple and you use no more than 20 different simple functions (like Visual Basic). In next versions, I think CIA could create a "user-friendly UI", to avoid some of scripting parts.

I tell you that's better than any other API calls because QlikView macros are really unstable with all "big QVW". With CIA report, it works like Windows Service and you can make planification to schedule reports: that's impossible with QlikView because OnReload trigger is inactive with QVS and Windows tasks schedule very unstable to launch macros

Regis

patrickanderson
Partner - Contributor III
Partner - Contributor III

I think CIA is a superior product. We have been evaluating both, but the one big issue is CIA cost more that our Qlikview Enterprise Server/Publisher Licenses, hard to get funding for an add-on that costs more that the base system. N-Printing may meet your needs at a sixth of the price, but in my opinion it is not as well designed as the CIA tool.

We will push for the funding to get CIA but may end up with N-Printing due to the reduced price point.

Once again this is my opinion, many others may differ.

Michael_Reese
Employee
Employee
Author

Thanks for everyone's responses.  I just wanted to close the loop on this. 

CIA is definitely more flexible.  NPrinting can accomplish some tasks a bit easier. 

I agree if CIA made some of the functionality less script-dependant, it would go a long away. 

The pricing models are very different.  CIA's one size fits all cost may be prohibitive for smaller clients.  NPrinting can exceed CIA's pricing with around 25+ dev licenses.

If you are evaluating these tools, the one you choose will depend on a number of factors.  If you need flexibility with products outside of Excel or pdf, PowerPoint for instance, CIA can do that. There is greater control over the formatting as well.

NPrinting is very good at looping and creating reports that have consistent formatting OOB.  If you have a lot of reports that fit the NPrinting mold, it would be easier to implement with this tool.  But you would also need to consider future reporting and additional complexity that may be required. 

One thing that QV Publisher has over both of these products is the ease in which you can reduce and distribute to a field in the data model.  Both tools can do this and both partners were bery helpful in demonstrating how.  CIA required scipting, but it wasn't difficult.  Though, this is something that would be better served in the GUI.  NPrinting was a bit more more difficult to configure for that purpose.

Not applicable

Any updates on these 2 tools?  I am evaluating both now.  I see that NPrint now (8/14/2013) does offer MS Word, PowerPoint and HTML in addition to Excel.  So for anyone reading this post it is slightly out of date.   That being said, have you worked with NPrint and these new Office options?

NPrint does seem easy to use. 

Thanks for any information you care to share!

Richard

Not applicable

Hi everybody,

I'm just getting around Nprinting solution.

I had a quick look to check how it is possible to built and distribute reports.

And so far, i haven't found how to deliver a dynamic  report to the end user; i mean the user cannot select into the report like he could do with QlikView.  Did i miss something or reports are just static?

Do you know the price for Nprinting?

best regards

Chris

gainkarthi
Partner - Specialist
Partner - Specialist

I guess NPRINTING is taking more time to open a large QVWs.

Not applicable

Dear Chris,

I'm Andrea, from the NPrinting support team. With NPrinting you can generate and automatically send HTML and Office reports that are static.

You can also create Excel pivot table using your QlikView data. You can use these tables to organize the data in the report dynamically. For example, you can use Pivot table filters to select only the data you want to see.

Please, have a look at this tutorial

Help - How to Create a Pivot Table from Excel Table Columns

Please, write me at support@vizubi.com if you have any questions about NPrinting.