I thought QlikView was supposed to be easy to learn

[#1]

Hello Everyone,

Of course I'm a newbie not only to this product but from a technical perspective BI in general. I'm not finding this product to be user friendly at all. Perhaps it's just the newness of it all but I'm wondering did anyone else fell this way at the start?

[suniljain]

Knowledge is power if and only if updated. for expertise in qlikview you have to keep your self upto date with technology . i.e Qlikview.

There is no limit of learning .

[#3]

I couldn't find the mentioned tutorial at C:\Program Files\QlikView\Tutorial ... can anyone help me by sending the same to my mail vishnu.s.here@gmail.com ??

[mazacini]

hi Required Link

http://www.qlik.com/us/services/training/free-training

[#5]

Has anyone written a book on Qlikview Yet?

[mazacini]

Hi

For what it's worth, here is my experience so far.

When I started out on Qlikview (about 3 months ago),I searched the internet for a book on Qlikview, and concluded that the only material in book form out there was the tutorial and manuals available as downloads from the Qlikview site.

That for me has been the biggest difference between the Qlikview learning experience and that for something like, say, Excel.

With Excel, there are many good books around, any one of which will give you a good understanding of the product. For me, it was a question of learning how each Excel menu item worked, as well as mastering as many of the Excel functions as possible.

If you follow the Qlikview tutorial, you would certainly get the impression that it is easy to learn. But it deals with a fairly simple data structures - it is designed primarily to demo the variety of ways in which data can be analysed and presented.

However, once you go beyond these simple structures, I find things get a lot trickier, especially if you do not have sql experience (which I don't). And I didn't find the tutorial / manual much help in these cases.

The good news is that the forum is excellent. So far I have had almost 100% succes rate in resolving any issues, in many cases by reference to previous postings on the matter, but also by posting new threads on the issues myself. There are also numerous blogs that can be helpful. (Somehere in the forum there is a great book, if all the suggested answers could be compiled into a coherent format!)

So while my learning process may not be as structured as that I would have been used to with Excel, it is targeted on specific issues I encounter.

Hope you find this of help.

[#7]

Easy to learn, a lifetime to master...

[stevedark]

Hi there,

After reading this thread and seeing subsequent postings over the following months prompted me to right a blog post on my thoughts around QlikView and the slogan Simplifying Analysis For Everyone.

You can read it here: http://bit.ly/k6KqC0

Cheers,

Steve

[johnw]

gilesslinger wrote:

I'm also new to this, and I'm gobsmacked by the lack of clarity.

I've got a lovely .csv of data. (International cricketers by country, date of birth etc etc, for those who are interested in analysing the impact of birth month on sporting success!). I'd like to use it to test out Qlikview

I expected to be able to find a button marked 'upload data', then to be able to dive immediately into sorting, averaging, showing means, subtotals, comparing one country against another and so on. I'm (a) stuck at first base - can't even work out how to upload the stuff and therefore (b) I'm not using it.

When you create a file (file -> new) in version 10, isn't the default behavior to launch a wizard to load your data?  I think I remember disabling that. 

Without that, I can see the immediate confusion when starting QlikView.  There's nothing obvious for "upload some data".  There's no reason you'd know that what you need to do is edit script (file -> edit script, also an icon, also control-E).  Even once there, it doesn't jump out at you, as the most obvious thing are some weird definitions at the top of the screen.  "No, I don't need to change the month names", you could think to yourself, and just close it right back down.  You need to look at the fine print down at the bottom, where it says "Data from Files" on a "Data" tab.  And even then, what button should we press for Excel?  Turns out it's "Table Files", which will finally launch a wizard to load data from Excel.  Well, sort of.  It launches a wizard to write script.  It doesn't actually load the file.  To do that, you need to hit "OK" to get out of the script editor... oh, and for goodness sake save at that point... and then find "Reload" (File -> Reload, an icon, or control-R).  The reason you save is that QlikView's default behavior if you have an error in your script when you reload is to give you options of continuing despite the error, or canceling the load, which then incidentally wipes out all unsaved changes.  Fun, huh?  Now, you can fix that by going into Settings -> User Preferences -> Save tab -> checkmark "Save Before Reload", but that's far from obvious too.

So yeah, I'll agree that it doesn't really work out of the box (though perhaps if I'm right about the v10 wizard it's a little better now).  You actually do need a few days of basic training to get much of anywhere with it.  I suspect that's true of most BI tools, even the ones that are supposed to be the most user-friendly.  For instance, I downloaded Tableau about a year ago to have a look.  I only had about an hour to poke at it, and was unable to figure out how to load in any data or make any charts in that hour.  I'm sure it's trivial to do so in Tableau, just as it's trivial to do so in QlikView, but nothing's trivial when you don't know how to do it.

Hopefully BI tools will get better over time, and the way they behave will probably become more familiar to people as well.  It seems to me that at the moment, they're targetted more towards IT professionals than towards anyone else, even if that's not who they ultimately WANT to target (or at least not the ONLY people they want to target).

[#10]

The best employees I ever had were good analysts and listeners first, then tool users.

So, if you have analytic skills, and you know what a column, row and join are, it will take 1 to 3 months to become truly proficient.

If not, it will take longer, because the lingo is new, and so are the concepts.  Understanding what an "associative database" is, by itself, can be a 30 minute lesson, much less how to write "load script" to make it right.

To be fair, if you are new to the tool, give yourself some time, and compare that time to any other new skill you attained by hard work and perseverence.

For example, if you wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or play golf, how long do you think it could take to get 'good'?

Or, if you bought your first SLR Camera, how long would it be before you could produce results which really 'pop'?

QlikView is the lowest learning curve of the BI tools I have managed and deployed, by far.

(Cognos, Microstrategy, BO, Essbase, and a few I can't recall)

[mr_barriesmith]

100% the truth.  Sometimes it is so obvious we miss the incredible elegance offered by QlikView.  Open QlikView and drag the CSV onto the QlikView application and the load data wizard opens. But QlikView is not a toy; it is a serious application... and just happens to be the best I have ever seen in this arena.