Here is the list of 5 essential tools for QlikView Developers. QlikTech provides some great tools and most of you are familiar with these tools. Hence I wanted to show some non-QlikTech tools and more general ones to simplify your everyday development efforts.
QViewer is a great tool to see the QVD file contents. This tool helps to debug and/or validate your data/schema without creating a throwaway QlikView application. This is paid tool if you wanted full version, however free version has a limit of 50,000 rows. If a QVD file has more rows then only first 50,000 will be loaded.
TortoiseSVN is a free software to manage version control of the source code. This tool will be very useful for version control and also when you have more than one Developer working on the same QlikView application. Please check the documentation for more information.
As you know, QlikView is all about RAM & CPU. Microsoft provides great utility to understand the behaviour of RAM, CPU, Disk & Network. This tool provides great detail compared to the usual Windows Task Manager. You can capture many counters related to your system from four major groups.
Processor Performance Counters
Memory Performance Counters
Disk Performance Counters
Network Performance Counters
You can see complete documentation on Microsoft Technet site.
Most of the time you might not have a QlikView/UI Designer. In this case, you need to manage the design tasks. Every designer uses some image editing software and sometimes it's hard if not impossible to get Adobe Photoshop installed on your computer because of cost or approvals. In this scenario, you can use the free image editors available on the web. These have similar features as Adobe Photoshop. I use them very often to create transparent images or edit the corporate logo.
Do you struggle with Paint? If yes, you would love "Greenshot" - which is a light weight screenshot software tool for Windows. You can create screenshots of a selected region, window or fullscreen. You can easily annotate, highlight or obfuscate parts of the screenshot. You can export the screenshot in various ways: save to file, copy to clipboard, attach to e-mail and send Office programs. It is very simple to use and it's free. I'm sure you would fall in love with another GREEN product!
I like Color Pix for those times when you need to match a client colour scheme. It grabs the colour values of selected pixels, which can easily be copied and pasted into the relvant Qlikview dialogs.
Screenshots is an issue in itself - many companies pay money for some tool to do that. I never understood why.
I have been using Paint.Net for that purpose for quite a while - it also lets you paint arrows and stuff in your screenshots, so it's great for preparing presentations and stuff.
The QViewer looks like a good option for ad-hoc reports - when management asks for some info on our data and they want it quick, but there is no app to display that because usually it's not needed. Is that right?
=> If so, I will request it to be purchased and installed here.
I have to say that SnagIt for screen capture has become one of my must have tools. The link to online storage such as Google Drive means that you can share what you have captured in a single click. The capture is uploaded and the URL for it is put in your clipboard to then paste into an email or IM session.
I like QViewer a lot, I think it is one of the essential tools for a QlikView Developer. Recently I've been testing another tool called Q-Eye (from ETL-Tools), that has similar functions (GUI is not that nice, but is just a aesthetic thing), besides you can edit QVDs directly in that tool and also convert QVDs to plenty formats.
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