I mostly agree with Stephen Few on this one, but not entirely. For instance:
"The problem with the pivot table, and all tables, is that we can only see relationships among the various groups by constructing them piece by piece from individual values in the table, trying to hold them in our heads as we do so, which is impossible due to the limits of working memory."
With the small number of variables here, and the subtotals available, we generally only need to look at a couple of values to answer a question, and can answer questions at more than one point in the hierarchy. So it doesn't seem as weak as he makes it out to be for this specific data set, even if I agree that he's correct in the general case.
Anyway, I want to look at this statement of his more closely:
"It must do so in a way that doesn't just make it easy to look up individual values, such as the number of female crew members who survived, which the table does well, but in a way that let's us easily see and compare all of the groups at various hierarchical levels (all people, all survivors, all females, all 1st class passengers, first class passengers that survived, female passengers that survived, female 1st class passengers who survived, etc.) at the same time." (emphasis added)
What I DON'T think is necessary in QlikView is having a single chart that can answer all of these questions at the same time. Rather, we're good as long as we can easily answer all of these questions. Multiple charts are fine. One or two clicks is fine. So a QlikView pivot table, for instance, can answer ALL of these questions by moving the dimensions around, just not all questions at the same time. Or you could have multiple charts that do it. Or some combination of the two like I proposed so that you can see the "most important" facts at a glance, and look up any additional information with just a few clicks.
His mentioning of "hierarchical levels" is perhaps a better way to say what I was trying to say with "summary information". The original chart allows data lookups at all hierarchical levels all in the same chart, and all visually rather than with numbers. In comparison, most of the solutions we've presented in this thread are only at a single level in the hierarchy. But I also like to stay away from "hierarchy" as there is no single hierarchy for this information. There are multiple possible hierarchies. And frankly, I don't think of it as a hierarchy at all. I see three dimensions. Actually, I see four. A person (could just be recno() here), sex, class, and whether they lived or died. No hierarchy implied by that in my opinion.
Interestingly, he mentions a visual crosstab of bar graphs, which sounds like the trellis chart solution by kjn, which does suffer from only being at a single level in the hierarchy. Perhaps he means something different than that. I'm not up on the lingo.
I should probably read the articles involved.
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