Dear all. I would like to start a discussion thread regarding one of the, from my point of view, weaknesses of QlikView: formatted reporting. The aim of this discussion is to share experiences, solutions for common problems, best practices,...
From my understanding, the only way to generate formatted reports is enclosing previously generated qlikview objects (charts, tables, etc.) in pdf or ppt. The main problem is that these objects are designed for analysis and not for reporting. To work this problem around, we usually create a new (and hiden) tab, with the same objects but incorporing some changes in order to adapt them for a print-prepared report... Nevertheless, the result is not as good as using reporting specific tools such us Crystal Reports, Oracle Publisher and so on...
We have been developing an Excel Add-In for creating reports from QlikView in Excel. It works as follows:
- You drag objects from your QlikView documents into your Excel file (this is a standard QV feature), for example listboxes, charts and tables. - The Add-In allows you to either 'map' entire charts/tables to excel ranges or run any QlikView expression in an Excel cell using a new function which is made available through the Add-In. - You build your pixel perfect reports then in Excel using the familiar environments. - The data is then 'live' and making selections in the listboxes you have dragged into your Excel file cause the reports to update.
We think it's particularly suited to creating financial reports and have a comprehensive guide here showing a P&L developed using the Add-In
