How to preserve row-level comments when generating a new Tabular Report?
Hi Community,
I have data in Qlik Cloud and want to generate a Tabular Report from it. The business maintains comments for each row on a separate sheet in Excel. Right now they manually export data in qlik, paste the comments from the excel sheet and use a VLOOKUP based on a key created in Qlik to bring these comments back into each new export.
What I want to achieve is a Tabular Report in Qlik that automatically keeps the comments from the previous file when generating a new one.
Has anyone implemented something like this or has ideas on how to approach it?
I think there are 2 ways of doing this really and both of the methods rely on the shared location where those comments are stored.
If you have a location where those comments are stored you may as well load those comments back to the app and use them as regular data. You are not explaining to us the actual workflow so I dont know if that is what you want but from technical point of view this is rather easy. You load comments back to the data model and link it via the same key you are currently using and output it as a second table in second sheet + VLOOKUP or simply as a column with data instead of VLOOKUP
Depending on how you store shared content you may create a Workbook links (MsOffice functionality) and use them as a source for your vlookup. I dont like this solution too much as it very much depends on factors like
whether the sharepoint document is opened or not when you refresh data
whether it was saved or not
I am not an expert in MsOffice so I cannot comment on its capabilities but I dont know how if you can use Workbook Links on shared workbooks.
The above are not really Qlik issues so there is nothing else we can add to it.
Bottom line is that if you want to reference comments in your vlookup you either need to have them available to everyone who gets report and be able to "refresh external data" (if your company policies allow that) or as I said before load them back to Qlik and simply output as data.
Lastly - There is Write Table feature on Qlik's roadmap which will allow you to put comments directly in Qlik Sense object. I believe this feature should be released in rather near future (cannot comment on ETA but demo of it was during last Qlik Connect), so maybe you can move your commentary directly to Qlik App which will be more robust solution? Just a thought.
cheers
Lech
cheers
cheers Lech, When applicable please mark the correct/appropriate replies as "solution" (you can mark up to 3 "solutions". Please LIKE threads if the provided solution is helpful to the problem.
I think there are 2 ways of doing this really and both of the methods rely on the shared location where those comments are stored.
If you have a location where those comments are stored you may as well load those comments back to the app and use them as regular data. You are not explaining to us the actual workflow so I dont know if that is what you want but from technical point of view this is rather easy. You load comments back to the data model and link it via the same key you are currently using and output it as a second table in second sheet + VLOOKUP or simply as a column with data instead of VLOOKUP
Depending on how you store shared content you may create a Workbook links (MsOffice functionality) and use them as a source for your vlookup. I dont like this solution too much as it very much depends on factors like
whether the sharepoint document is opened or not when you refresh data
whether it was saved or not
I am not an expert in MsOffice so I cannot comment on its capabilities but I dont know how if you can use Workbook Links on shared workbooks.
The above are not really Qlik issues so there is nothing else we can add to it.
Bottom line is that if you want to reference comments in your vlookup you either need to have them available to everyone who gets report and be able to "refresh external data" (if your company policies allow that) or as I said before load them back to Qlik and simply output as data.
Lastly - There is Write Table feature on Qlik's roadmap which will allow you to put comments directly in Qlik Sense object. I believe this feature should be released in rather near future (cannot comment on ETA but demo of it was during last Qlik Connect), so maybe you can move your commentary directly to Qlik App which will be more robust solution? Just a thought.
cheers
Lech
cheers
cheers Lech, When applicable please mark the correct/appropriate replies as "solution" (you can mark up to 3 "solutions". Please LIKE threads if the provided solution is helpful to the problem.
