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Time dimension in QlikView (vs PowerPivot)?

Hi

I've done some work with MS PowerPivot regarding dashboards projects. But since QlikView is an excellent software, and demanded by clients, I have now just started to learn this very interesting software

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I have a question about how to handle time (year, months, days... and weeks) as long as I have date values in my data:

  • In PowerPivot I would use the date and time functions as showed in this attached pdf. You can also use the FORMAT() function as shown in this video by Bill Jelen: Link
  • I would then create a sheet/table with time/calendar data and link it to the rest of my data tables with the date column, etc
  • As I understand it in QlikView I will prefer to calculate fields as "Monday", "March", Week 45, etc "1 quarter" in the back-end/script => at least as much as I can, and perhaps use set analysis in the front-end expressions to i.e compare sales for 2011 againts 2011
  • (I see the graphs and tables in QlikView mainly as Pivot objects, where you can see your data from different views/dimensions by using different techniques.. So i need these different time dimensions as well as other dimensions, i.e countries, city's, postal code, and so on..)

     => my first try would then be to make a time-tabell in excel (just like in PowerPivot) with the dimensions I need, and import this file into the QlikView      text editor, and then link it there to the rest of the data... These time dimensions will not change as long as I have the date-range for my data

My questions (finally ) would be:

The part over is how I am thinking of solving it -

1) But is there any QlikView best practice to solve time handling? In a way that is known and accepted by experienced QlikView users, so that my client can feel safe that we do not develop a to complicated solution which will be hard to support when finished...

2) Are there any other factors I should think about?

3) Comparing weeks from this year and last year is complicated (when you also can select the month and date from listboxes) - what do I need to consider when I can view my data in year, month, week and day?

I would appreciate hints about how to start solving these problems

PS: I have also attached PDF about Set Analysis (its a good, small tutoarial), does someone perhaps know about something like this for this time diemension issue?

2 Replies
swuehl
MVP
MVP

A good practice is to work with a master calendar, please check out the forum searching for master calendar, there are lots of examples, e.g.

http://community.qlik.com/qlikviews/1001

Then for point in time reporting, as you already noticed, you could make good use of set analysis, I personally found this series of blogs quite useful:

http://iqlik.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/the-magic-of-set-analysis-point-in-time-reporting/

I hope this is what you were looking for, have a nice weekend,

Stefan

Not applicable
Author

Thanx Stefan. This information looks good, I'll have a deeper look at it.