My organizaiton recenlty acquired Qlikview, and I am looking for ways in which the software could be useful to our team.
At first, I thought Qlikview would be useful for creating dashboards that could be used by clients who want to answer questions using data, but have limited analytic skills. However, it appears that I will only be able to share my Qlikview documents with other users who also have a Qlikview license. My clients won't have Qlikview licenses, so I guess I can't use it for this purpose?
So it seems that if Qlikview will have any use for me, it will have to involve assisting me with internal analyses. However, I am an experienced data analyst, and can usually answer any question I want using a combination of Excel and VBA. What kinds of questions/problems are more easily resolved using Qlikview than Excel/VBA? Does Qlikview have canned statistical procedures unavailable in Excel? Can Qlikview handle larger datasets? Can I use Qlikview to generate cool static figures that I incorporate into slide decks or something? Any other ideas?
It's very easy to load data from various sources into qlikview and create a data model that ties the data together properly. In my experience this is a lot harder to do in excel. It's also very easy to modify data. For example to replace values or looking up values from other tables based on various conditions or generate missing data.
Qlikview also makes it very easy to spot weird data. By selecting values in one field it's immediately clear what values are associated in other fields and which combination exist or don't exist. That can be done in excel or sql, usually with nested subqueries or complex joins. In Qlikview this is soooo much easier with just a view clicks to get the result.
Qlikview does have a basic set of statistical functions. So standard deviations and lineair regressions are easy enough. Monte Carlo is very doable: Monte Carlo Methods.
