Custom Groups on the Fly - by end user

[#1]

Hi,

I am looking for a solution to the need to create "Custom Grouping on the Fly" end-user functionality (in IE Plugin QV, not just QV desktop). It is fairly standard in many other BI tools (Tableau, COGNOS, IRI's PlusSuite) and will significantly enhance the user experience.

There are frequent end-user requirements to group values from a dimension and compare those groupings in a table or chart. These could be specific (seemingly random), cherry-picked, customers or prodcuts maybe at different levels in a hierarchy, from different dimensions even (say Brand and Sub-brand or CustomerGrp1 and CustomerGrp2). There is also be a need to create the functionality to create these groups using some sort of logic or calculation - but without the end-user needing to write code. Some sort of muti-step wizard would work here.

The ability to share these groups with other users should also be created.

At present the only way I have found to create these "Custom Groups" is to cherry pick from the selectors and save a Bookmark - but that only enables us to render one custom group at a time - often the need is to compare many such groups simultaneously. The only option is to extract the data from QlikView and do the job elsewhere....not ideal.

No matter how good or flexible the underlying data hierarchy, there will always be a user need to create they're own custom groupings, on the fly.

I'm interested to hear if anyone else has thought about this and what they have done about it.

Best regards,

Ross

[Anonymous]

You could potentially use an input field and a macro to tag the selected values with a group name fed into a variable for example. This way you could create several custom groups within the frontend.

[swuehl]

It might be worth following your idea with the bookmarks, you can use set analysis to compare different sets, like

=sum( {BM01} Sales )

to show Sales for custom group bookmarked in BM01. You can set up almost everything, just let your users select the subsets of data and replace the bookmarks needed.

Also look into the similar concept of Alternate states (available since QV11). There is a demo for alternate states in the What's New in QV11 demo app on the QT demo server.

Not sure if you get the full, same flexibility with other tools, but I am pretty sure you can create some flexibility in custom grouping.

Regards,

Stefan