Qlik Sense Cookbook

Over 80 recipes on data analytics to solve business intelligence challenges, 2nd Edition

Pablo Labbe, Philip Hand, Neeraj Kharpate

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788997171
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Modelling & Design
• Index: Computer Science

Create dynamic dashboards to perform interactive analytics for business intelligence operations

Key Features

• Explore newly added features in Qlik Sense
• Discover best practices to work with data using Qlik Sense
• Learn to implement advanced functions for better data insight

Book Description

Qlik Sense allows you to explore simple and complex data to reveal hidden insight and data relationships that help you make quality decisions for overall productivity. An expert Qlik Sense user can use its features for business intelligence in an enterprise environment effectively. Qlik Sense Cookbook is an excellent guide for all aspiring Qlik Sense developers and will empower you to create featured desktop applications to obtain daily insights at work.

This book takes you through the basics and advanced functions of Qlik Sense February 2018 release. You'll start with a quick refresher on obtaining data from data files and databases, and move on to some more refined features including visualization, and scripting, as well as managing apps and user interfaces. You will then understand how to work with advanced functions like set analysis and set expressions. As you make your way through this book, you will uncover newly added features in Qlik Sense such as new visualizations, label expressions and colors for dimension and measures.

By the end of this book, you will have explored various visualization extensions to create your own interactive dashboard with the required tips and tricks. This will help you overcome challenging situations while developing your applications in Qlik Sense.

What you will learn

• Source, preview, and distribute your data through interactive dashboards
• Explore and work with the latest visualization functions
• Learn how to write and use script subroutines
• Make your UI advanced and intuitive with custom objects and indicators
• Use visualization extensions for your Qlik Sense dashboard
• Work with Aggr and learn to use it within set analysis

Who this book is for

Qlik Sense Cookbook is for data and BI analysts who want to become well versed with Qlik Sense to apply business intelligence in data. If you are a beginner in data analytics and want to adopt an independent recipe-based approach to learn the required concepts and services in detail, this book is ideal! Individuals with prior knowledge of its sister product, QlikView, will also benefit from this book. Familiarity with the basics of business intelligence is a prerequisite.

Managing Apps and the User Interface

In this chapter, we will be dealing with the user interface in Qlik Sense. We will cover the following topics:

• Publishing a Qlik Sense^® application created in Qlik Sense^® Desktop
• Creating private, approved, and community sheets
• Publishing a Qlik Sense^® application to Qlik Sense^® Cloud
• Creating geo maps in Qlik Sense^®
• Reference lines in a Sales versus Target gauge chart
• Effectively using the KPI object in Qlik Sense^®
• Creating treemaps
• Creating dimensionless bar charts in Qlik Sense^®
• Adding reference lines to trendline charts
• Creating text and images
• Applying limitations to charts
• Adding thumbnails to a clear environment
• Navigating many data points in a scatter chart
• Using alternative dimensions and measures
• Using the visual exploration menu

Introduction

The information required for analysis and decision-making within an organization is communicated via the user interface in Qlik Sense. We discussed the best design practices in Chapter 2, Visualizations. We will take this discussion a step further and learn how to implement a few key objects found in Qlik Sense in our applications, which will help the business convey the desired information to the end user in an effective manner. The chapter starts with important concepts for managing Qlik Sense applications, such as publishing apps on the server and on Qlik Sense Cloud. In later parts, the chapter deals with topics such as the use of reference lines and navigating data points in scatter charts in a Qlik Sense application.

Publishing a Qlik Sense® application created in Qlik Sense® Desktop

The licensing model of Qlik would not be very useful if everyone used Qlik Sense Desktop only for themselves. In a published BI environment, simply creating an application in Qlik Sense Desktop will not suffice; it has to be made available to the end user. The application needs to be published via the Qlik Sense Management Console.

Getting ready

To accomplish this recipe, you need access to Qlik Sense Enterprise Server. You need some administration rights, such as content admin or root admin, to execute the following steps as well.

How to do it...

Any Qlik Sense application that is created in Qlik Sense Desktop needs to be imported using the Qlik Sense management console prior to publishing it:

1. To do this, open the Qlik Sense Qlik Management Console (QMC) through the Windows shortcut or use the following URL:

https://<Qlik Sense Server Hostname>/QMC 

2. In the QMC, click on Apps in the left pane and go to the Apps section.
3. Click on the Import button in the bottom pane.
4. Click on Choose File, select the application to be uploaded from your local folder, and press Import. Once imported, select the app and click Publish in the action bar.
5. You will be prompted to specify a stream for the application. Choose a stream from the defined streams in the drop-down menu.
6. Click on OK to publish.

How it works...

Publishing an application is the first step toward sharing the application with a wider set of end users. Once published, the layout of the application cannot be changed. Also, the publication of the application cannot be undone and you will have to delete the application to remove it from the stream. A better approach to handling such a situation is to duplicate the application without publishing it and make the desired changes to the duplicate application. We can then use the Replace existing app option to replace a published app.

There's more...

Sheets and bookmarks can be published and categorized as Private, Approved, or Community. This will be discussed in the next recipe.

Creating private, approved, and community sheets

Sheets are the key components of a Qlik Sense application. They contain all the objects that carry information and provide a framework for analysis. There are three types of sheet that can be defined in a Qlik Sense application. These are private, approved, and community sheets:

• Approved sheets are all sheets that are defined by the author of the application. These cannot be changed by the user and are defined as read-only.
• Private sheets can be viewed only by the author of the app...