STT - Qlik Sense Visualization Showcase

[Troy_Raney]

Environment

• Qlik Cloud
• Qlik Sense Client Managed

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the October edition of Techspert Talks. I'm Troy Raney and I'll be your host for today's session. Today's presentation is Qlik Sense Visualization Showcase with Patrick Nordström. Patrick, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah. Thanks, really nice to be here Troy. So, my name is Patrick Nordström. I'm the product manager for Qlik Sense Visualizations and GeoAanalytics. I've been with Qlik since 2017. Before that, I worked at Idevio which formed the product GeoAnalytics. Since then, I'm doing other things as well; keeping track of all the charts not just the map chart.
Great. Well today, we're going to be taking a look at a lot of different things different chart types; different solutions you found that customers have really benefited from; and best practices for visualizations, but first we wanted to start off with demonstrating one of the newest improvements with how we make apps: and that's the Authoring tool, right?
Yes. It's called the New Simplified Authoring mode or method.
So, what are we looking at here?
So, we have made several different changes. One of the things that we found, many people, the first thing that they have created is a table with all the fields.
Okay.
So, we decided to have access to that directly. So, as soon as you drop a data set on Sense, you will immediately see not just the fields and the field names, but also the individual values in the tables that you loaded. And you can switch between different tables if you have that. And it's also possible to expand.
That's great getting to see it right there in front of you.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's probably what you want the first thing directly. You can also, all the types and the categories are clickable. So, you can make selections inside of edit mode, because that's something you couldn’t do prior. So, now the selection bar is visible.
Yeah.
The other thing that we made changes to is the field list; and you see all the fields that I've loaded. Now I can expand that one and see the different categories together with a histogram and a frequency count to show how frequent the different values are. And of course, I can make changes here as well. And it shows with a nice little indicator that I had made a selection here as well as in the selection bar. If you notice the icons, we also detect what kind of fields you have loaded; whether it's a text field, if it's a numeric field, or if it's some kind of geographic field to hold some kind of geographic information.
Wow. So, much is happening before you even create your first visualization. That's so cool.
Absolutely. Then for those who have been around for a while. So, we moved the Properties Panel; used to be far right, but now it's connected close to the field list. And we also, the first time you enter the sheet, we immediately create an object for you. So, then you can start exploring dropping fields and data on this object that we created for you. So, I dropped the dimension. Maybe I want drop something that I know will be a measure, and it immediately detects this it's a numeric field with a good spread. Probably some kind of measure.
Cool. So, you just dropped it in there because you weren't quite sure, or you're testing out the suggestion; it just detected that it was going to be a measure, and let you see what it looks like as a measure?
Yeah. So, that's the calculation engine, but we also have a cognitive engine that tries to detect and draw conclusions from the data that I've loaded. We are using the Auto-Chart a lot. And you could use that before as well, you could just drop the fields on the canvas, but we also made it easy switch between the different presentation. Also, the Line Chart and the Area Chart is the same chart in the Advanced Authoring, but here it has a different category; just to make it easy accessible.
Nice.
Not all of the charts are available here. We will be expanding this section. So, you will have access to more charts.
I love that being able to just play around with the data. It gives suggestions, but lets you still manipulate it and look at closer into your data as you're building it, before it actually becomes something on the sheet.
Yeah, absolutely. And when you are dropping things on the sheet, you will see that the different charts have different properties. So, let's go back to just a Vertical Bar Chart. Anyway, I can switch to a Stacked one if I want. So, far we talked about things that are already available in Sense. Also, we provided this type of fast access to properties with these expandable panels. So, if I want to change Sorting I go over here; if I want to change the Coloring; if I want to change the Labels; and I can also change the Font Styling. Nowadays, we'll see this not just in the Titles and the Subtitles and the Footnotes, but you will also get this in other types of text and labels inside of Sense. You could do Font Styling prior, but you had to do a Custom Theme for it. One of the things that is totally new for the Simplified Authoring is the way that we can do Chart Filtering. Maybe I don't want to see ‘Women's Wear’ in this specific chart. Pick that field, drop it to filter this specific visualization. Now I can decide ‘Women's Wear’ and I want to exclude ‘Women's Wear.’
Okay.
Then I will automatically get the text in the footnote: “Filter supplied category name, not ‘Women's Wear.’” I can of course change this to something else, but it immediately makes some kind of indication there is filtering going on that is not part of the global selection.
Yeah, and that makes it so easy. Just drop it in there - I love that.
Yeah, I mean, you don't have to know so much of them before start using it. And you can pick values, exclude values, you can search for values to include or exclude, you can just set up conditions, if you have like ‘sum of sales above some kind of threshold,’ or you can make the chart just ignore the selection. Maybe you want to have a chart that should stay the same all the time independently what kind of selections the user might make.
Okay.
That's probably the biggest change about the Simplified Authoring. This has also a side effect. A new type of writing Set Analysis. For those of you who follow Henric Cronströms blogs. He explained how you now can have the Set expression as a prefix to the expression. Many people have liked that a lot. There's minor changes as well. You can directly change the sheet title without going into properties. If you want to have more charts, you have the fast buttons to just to create new charts, so, it's no need to resize or anything. You just click and get a new one. So, it's very much tailored for first-time users having an easy experience to create the first chart and testing new things, but it's also beneficial for experienced user when we are trying out something new or maybe you're prototyping something before we do something.
And once they get to where they're ready in further edit mode or actually start analyzing the data; they just click on Edit Sheet to close it out, or?
Yeah. When they're done, just if you want to switch over; maybe I want to do settings, some kind of sheet settings, or - you always have access to the old by switching the Advanced option button.
Now Patrick, I know you spend a lot of your time talking to customers and fielding questions, how to do things; and then your answers become apps you share on Qlik Community. What solution would you like to highlight today?
Yeah absolutely. The inflow of questions don't seem to stop. So, I'm now up to 6 of these apps on the Community. They're all linked together. I would like to highlight I haven't come up with the solutions all by myself. Many of them are available in other forums on the Community; other experts have come up with these and I just compiled them, but some of them are my own.
Oh, it looks like a great collection.
Yeah.
Okay. So, what does this have to do with titles?
Yeah, people are paying as much as attention to the text and the title of a chart as the chart itself. And it made me think: what kind of titles do I use when I create a chart? I just pick the measure and the dimension, calling it ‘Sales per Year’ or something or ‘Sales Share per Category,’ but you don't have to do that. You could use the title in in a more dynamic way. So, instead of saying your ‘Sales per Year,’ I can make a statement about the last period: it's gonna up 3.2% in the last period. And I can also put in this type of dimension-based reference lines that we introduced last year to indicate what's happened.
Right.
But if you make the title dynamic, it will respond to the both when you load new data, as well as you make selections.
That's excellent. It makes it so much more powerful with telling a story right away, because you're right. People always, first thing, they look at the image maybe and then they read the title and vice versa. Can you show us how you did that?
Yeah. Every app that I made is intended to be able to be investigated. So, the load script is there if I do any modifications with the data when I load it. I can also go in expressions and have a look. First, I'm just having some kind of switch to be able to switch on and off for the button to switch the titles on and off.
Right.
Then the next one is where I build up this string that Sales; and then I calculate the percentage, which is the last period. I calculate what's for the maximum year, compare that to the maximum year -1. With the number presentation, I can tell whether the sales are going up or down in the last period.
That's great.
So, it's fairly simple. It's easy to Google to see ‘how do I find the sum of sales for the last year.’ Of course you can tailor this even more efficiently if you have a very specific visualization; you can make it even more elaborate, tailored more to your dashboard.
That's excellent. So, what's the next one from the 24 Days of Visualization?
Yep. So, the next one is about adding help. In many cases, I see apps where you start building out something, and then you find yourself that you want to explain to the user, provide context for the user, explain what the measures are. When you build a dashboard, it's not so much about how many charts that you can put in at the same time, and decide not to show all the charts, at least not at the same time. There are several ways to provide this type of context-based text. You could have a button with a link, you could just have a text and image object, and write something; but you could also use the container object.
So, the container object was released a couple years ago. In that case, you could use one of the tabs, together with text and image object, to have this explanatory text with images to explain what's going on, and you can also have links to other charts to provide additional information.
Exactly, and it's not taking up real estate on the sheet as well, you can just have it available but not taking up valuable space. I love that.
Exactly. This is the type of dual use I like. It's also possible to extend sheets nowadays. There's a setting for the sheet to be extendable. So, you can extend it downwards. and then you could use the scroll bars to provide additional information.
In design, you should provide an overview first, and details later. If you find yourself, you start building a dashboard; I need this chart as well and this table, and this you should try to put them in some kind of order. Maybe they can go in tabs.
Where was that setting again? It felt like it was so obvious, but so hidden.
Yeah. So, it's just a switch: Extend Sheet.
Okay.
If you want to be even more elaborate, you can show and hide sheets. So, that is the Show Condition for the sheet. Maybe you have one app with a lot of different things; then you could split up the functionality in different sheets.
Okay, that's really cool.
Something we released quite recently, just a couple of weeks ago, is the ability to link apps together. Now you could split up the functionality into different apps, and then you could have a button to say that now I want to move to the Production or the HR app; and I can transfer my selection. In the background, the selection is stored in a bookmark; and the new app is opened with that bookmark. I can show what it's where it's at. It's only available in SaaS. Application chain - and then you pick the app ID and the sheet ID.
Great! And then people push that button, it will hold all those selections in a bookmark; and then open the new app with the selections already applied?
Yeah.
What about providing context? To like a KPI?
Yeah. I like to highlight the tables that I would like to see people are using more. And one of them is the Table Indicators. Here's a typical table without any indicators. This is a good way to allow for the table to carry more information or more context. I can have this type of traffic lights, if I have some kind of threshold for the discounts when I'm selling things; I want to be on low discounts. High discount is bad for me. So, that's why I indicate that with red. I can also indicate the variance if these sales figures are moving up and down. I can use arrows.
Yeah.
I can also highlight the highest value and the lowest value. And I'm using something called Indicators. And under the discount, there is this possibility to pick something else than text which is called the Indicator.
Okay.
And then I set up Limits. In this case, everything below 5% discount is good, between 5 and 6 -intermediate, everything above 6 is less good. And then I can also pick an icon to use. Don't have to code anything; you just pick the Indicators; set the limits; set the values that you present into perspective: are they good? Are they bad? What's the trend? Where are they moving?
That's great to be able to show quickly a lot of meaning.
Yeah. Another way to spice up the tables is something called Sparklines. Here I have some kind of value: new cases at some point in time. It doesn't provide any context. Are we on an upgoing trend or a downtrend? Sparklines allows you to take a measure. Now pick Mini-Chart, and then I pick a second dimension to spread this measure across.
Okay.
So, now I'm looking at the new cases per million, but on a weekly trend since some kind of date. I also decided to have colors for the maximum and the minimum positions. It's not really hard to do either. It's just to pick Mini-Chart; pick a dimension, and you can decide whether you want to have it as a Sparkline; whether you want to use Bars instead, or just Dots instead, or you could just use something called Positive and Negative. That is if it varies from plus and minus; but in this case, probably Sparklines are the best option.
Yeah, it's very pretty and clear; as well it's not too cluttered.
Yeah. And something which is quite popular is to use some kind of KPI cards. And there's different ways. I can show you one possible way to do that.
Yeah, please.
The trellis container.
Okay.
I want to show this type of Mini-Charts across a dimension. I have my different categories of Sales, and I want to show how they are performing over a year. I also want to indicate that current month. I want to have indicate some kind of deviation going up or down. One way to do that is to use the Trellis Container. I created a Combo Chart for this. I made it a Master Visualization. I added my data starting with the sales figures. I used the expression to calculate whether we are on the current month and highlight that with a bluish color.
Okay.
I use the markers to indicate the forecast; and I have another the Line Chart to indicate the line. Maybe now, I went over the top I have a lot of KPIs going on at the same time here. Maybe that's not the best practice.
Yeah, it's cool to see what's possible.
Absolutely.
So, this is a container with that same chart over and over, but with a different dimension?
Yeah, exactly, yeah. When I want to change the titles, and then I use something called the advanced mode for a trellising. So, if I go in here, have a look at the chart here. I use a variable that holds the set expression to allow me to calculate the variance for this specific category.
Okay.
Otherwise, the title would be the same for all of the charts.
Yeah. One thing that I've always been a fan of: is being able to hover over a point in a chart and get some more information. I understand you've demonstrated how you can maximize the power of that? Can you show us those tool tips?
Absolutely. Something we called Chart in tooltips, or Custom Tooltips.
Okay.
Also plays well with this ‘provide an overview first.’ Here's all my customers with the sales figures and the discounts. Maybe I want to provide additional information. And I can do that just by hovering, and then I can provide a custom title, a custom description, I can add additional measures, but I can also add a chart inside of the tooltip.
That's so cool.
And what happens is that when I do that; it would create a state where this value is selected. So, these are the sales figures specifically for this customer named Grunewald in this case.
Okay. So, hovering over that point makes that selection to generate that chart that we're seeing in the tooltip?
Absolutely. And also the expressions are also tailored in that way. Since you can use any type of Master Visualization inside of a tooltip, you can combine them in different ways. For instance: maybe I have a sales chart that shows the momentary sale per day. And then I have these peaks; and then I can provide additional information: what are the biggest customer buying things at this specific date that was behind this peak of additional states.
This is a great way to allow the user to intuitively dive deeper into the details when it's needed, without having to use up valuable sheet space with another chart.
Yeah. Yeah, and this type of functionality is available for the Bar Chart, Bullet chart, Combo Chart, Line, Map Chart, Pie Chart, Scatter, and the Treemap. Just in a matter of days, we are also adding it to the KPI. KPIs normally is the overview. You provide some kind of overview figure, and then you could have as you hover over a KPI, you can provide this additional information. The KPI also have this possibility to have an action tied to it. So, you can click on it and go to another sheet. So, you could have 3 levels of information: you can see the chart, and then as you hover over it - you get more information, and then you can add a third option to clik on the KPI to come to a sheet that's all about this KPI.
That sounds cool. Before we leave this, can you show us in the settings where we enable those?
Yes, absolutely. So, now I have this container with different tabs. So, first I go to the Scatter, and then I go to the edit properties, and then I have the Custom Tooltip.
Yeah. Do you have a workaround for people who want to create a more advanced chart type that isn't out of the box?
Absolutely. Because of the table now supports that you can have images in the table. So, if I go in here, in the table, there is a way to go in and decide that this should not be a text, or an indicator, or a Mini-Chart, but it can also be an image.
Okay.
And normally, that image would be a URL. But there is a way to specify the image within the URL. Let's call a Data URI or an inline image. And one of the options that you have for inline images is to use SVG. And SVG is a graphical language. Basically you describe different geometries and what color they should have and where they should be positioned. So, it's perfect to make this type of small Mini-Chart that doesn't exist in the standard portfolio.
Right. So, this is not out of box, but it's a way of getting around that to make more advanced visualizations?
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes people call for being able to inject HTML or JavaScript within the dashboard which could be quite unsafe. And that's why I'm a strong proponent of using this type of graphical language instead, that you could add something.
Yeah.
For instance, this is a Bullet Chart, and it consists of three different boxes in the background. It's a gray one, it's a yellow one, and a green one.
Okay.
The last one is black line which is this black rectangle. And then I just move the position based on a KPI. So, here I'm picking up the value from the first measure column. In this case, the sales forecast. So, everything above 100% is of course green in this case. If I make selections, this will change.
Yeah.
And my images will change accordingly.
Yeah, that's impressive. That's so completely interactive. You can hover over things and make selections in there. That's amazing.
Yeah. Because of the images, you can also provide additional text. You can also add a label to it. In this case, adding sales and forecast ratio, and then I'm adding this line break to it, and then it becomes some kind of mini pop-up as well.
Okay, great. Now it's time for Q&A. Please submit your questions through the Q&A panel on the left side of your On24 console. Patrick, I see the first question is: would you please show how to build a Gantt chart since Qlik does not have that as a default option?
Yeah. So, that gives you a good opportunity also to talk about the feature that we released in August 2021 last year. It's a small thing, but it has some nice implications that you could actually build more things. The Gantt Chart is a quite a specific chart. You want to show activities start and end at some kind of bar chart, probably. And you maybe, you also want to show duration, whether it's completion rate; maybe you want to have some indicators as well. The in-data for a Gantt Chart is base in - most of the time, you have your activities. They are grouped in some kind of manner. In A and B, they have a start date; they have a duration; maybe they have some kind of completion - a ratio as well. What you can do is: to use the new version of the Combo Chart, which you could set to be stacked. And then you start by using the minimum start date - that's the first measure. The offset, which is the sum of duration as the second one.
Okay.
I now have the different activities as my Dimension. And I flip it. So, yeah: y-axis is over here, like that. And the next thing that I do is: I set this axis to be have the maximum and minimum of the start date, and the end date. To be able to zoom in on the right time in in this area. So, now it starts to look like a Combo Chart. Next time - the next thing I want to do is: to color the offset, which is the blue staples over here. And I set them to be transparent, which allows me to now position them in time. I color them also in this case by the group. So, all the A-tasks, it has one color. Something like that.
It's nice.
Next thing I'm adding is: I'm adding a reference line for today, which I can do. And then I also add a Custom Tooltip to have a nicer presentation of the data. I can hide the duration bar. And I can add the completion rate. I have two different ratios. So, you can see for instance in this one, it's only completed to 69%. I can have this type of indication. I can use the marker line to indicate that I have some kind of milestones going on. And I can indicate whether I have dependencies between the two activities like this. If I have the group as a second dimension, I can then also group tasks together in time if I want.
That is really excellent.
There's a lot of things that you can actually do with the Combo Chart. And all based on something that we called ‘color per measure.’ So, as I go in here, I can see - let's go to the last one. Here you have the data. I have the activities. I have my offset. And I'm going to more properties. I can see that I've set it to be transparent. The completion rate in the first one to be on a darker color. And what's left of using my completion ratio, and then I dim down that color a bit.
Okay.
And then I have the markers. And then I add the lines; and of course I go in and I have a Custom Tool Tip. So, I have the measures for the start date, end date, completion rate; whether it's dependent on something, as well as a milestone. So, quite a lot that you could do with the combo chart.
Yeah. There's a lot going on there, but it's - the end result is amazing.
Yeah, I mean it's not - maybe you want to have more in your Combo Chart. Maybe you could make it easier to make. And so, at some point in time there will be - probably be a specific Gantt Chart. But still, there is a quite quick recipe to follow if you want to have this type of activity charter or Gantt Chart in your in your app.
All right, moving on to the next question: which is the best way to get odd rows colored without using a theme?
That is an old tip actually from the very first tip app that I made back in 2019. So, what you can do is: that you could use the row numbers. Row number total. I'll use the modular every even row gets a light gray color, and all the others gets white. So, that's one way to do it without using Custom Themes.
Great.
There's another way to do it with a Custom Theme, which will be to use CSS. The downside of using this one is that if you use row number with total, you kind of mess up the sorting; you can't do sorting. But if you don't care so much about having to do custom sorting, you can use this method. Or you could use this method to color, this type of pajama striping for rows in the table.
Okay, great. We got a question here: where can I find more information about the latest Qlik Sense capabilities?
I think the best way is to make sure that you have a Qlik Cloud account. Because we have in-app announcements inside of Qlik Sense where it tells you where we make announcements of new features. And in addition to that, we also have the videos from that are made by Mike Tarallo that sums up all the new changes coming.
Right.
For those of you who are on our own client-managed, we also provide something called a Technical Preview. So, you can download and test new things. As we announce those technical previews, I usually make an app with all the new things that we have released for cloud that's coming to a client managed at the end of the quarter. And then you also have the product - The Innovation Blog that you could read up on and see all the new things that are coming. So, there's a lot of different channels out there. You also have the Help, of course. So, for every new release for client manage, there is a section called ‘What's New’ which summarizes most of it. And also at the demo section of demos.Qlik.com, there's also this ‘What's New’ app. That hosts the six latest versions, and you can actually - if you log on - you can download it and play with it as well.
Well, that's great to demonstrate that. And again, we'll provide some links to everything that Patric's mentioned here along with recording of this presentation. We have time for a few more questions. Will we be able to increase the font size in charts? X, Y-axis as well as bar numbers?
Yeah. So, you can already do this with a Custom Theme. You can create a Custom Theme. And I'm going in and edit. I have a couple of themes that I'm using, that actually will - change the font styling width and color as well as the font family also inside of the charts.
That's nice. I haven't really played around with that before. It's cool to see it.
But we are also, just as I showed with the Simplified Authoring where you could pick a font for the subtitle, and the title and the footnote; you will also be able to do this directly inside of the chart. Hopefully this is coming already this Autumn. But we'll see when it shows up. There's a lot of things going on at the same time right now.
Yeah. Great. All right, next question is: what is the best way to customize the layout of Qlik apps?
So, we already talked a bit about this. And for me right now, I think what I think could give the best value for money is to manage screen estate. You've managed to screen estate with having different sheets, but you can also use the Container to flip between different sheets and manage that way. You also have the extendable sheets. So, you can have the overview charts at the at the top, and more specific ones further down below. You also have the Custom Tool Tips where you can also bring up charts at the point where people want to request it. That said, we are looking into ways to improve on the grid to allow for more things than we can do right now. The grid is fairly static. It's kind of hard to do things wrong, to place things in a strange manner. But we will open up on this one, because the grid is quite rigid today. So, it might be that we will be able to position things more freely. Also, maybe able to do overlapping. When it comes to layouting, we also would like to be able to style the background color, and the border color, and things like that from the individual objects. We also want to group objects together in a in a nicer way. So, if you're interested in layouts, we have pretty a lot of new things coming off later this year and in the beginning of next year.
Great, all right. Well, I think that's all the time we have. Yeah, thank you very much, Patric. I think this will be really interesting and helpful for a lot of people, just to find new solution possibilities, understand all the different settings are available, and especially get introduced to the Authoring Tool if it's new to them.
Cool. Thank you very much, Troy.
Thank you everyone. We hope you enjoyed this session. Thank you to Patric for presenting. We always appreciate getting experts like Patric to share with us. Here is our legal disclaimer; and thank you once again. Have a great rest of your day.