Highlighting a “special” dimension in bar charts

A great way to provide your end-users added insight from a bar chart is to highlight a special dimension value.

What is a “special” dimension value?? For example, if you’re reporting on market share between your company and competitors, you should highlight “Our Company” on the chart. Stephen Few has a nice example on this topic in “Information Dashboard Design,” Chapter 6.

Another example would be if you’re a Product Manager and are looking at sales figures across various products in the line. By highlighting the specific product that you manage you can see where it stacks up against the rest … at a glance.

Imagine we really want to focus on Product = Alpha, and let’s highlight it with a saturated red bar:

So, naturally we need to figure out how to do this in QlikView, right?!

Controlling Background Color

Fortunately there is a nifty feature in the Expression Properties of the Chart object that allows you to dynamically control the Background Color of the bars. And because it itself is an expression you can use if-then logic or any other expression you can conjure.

Here I’ve chosen to use the red() function, but of course you can use any similar color function or rgb().

So this solution is just fine, except it requires that the dimension of interest be hard-coded into the expression in the chart properties. That may be okay for static analysis (like the market share example above – our company vs. our competitors). But for something that could change frequently (like Product) it would be a much more sustainable solution to be able to dynamically control the dimension of interest.

Dynamically controlling the dimension of interest

One way to make the dimension of interest dynamic is to store it in a variable. And then drop an Input Box object on the page. In this example we’ll call the variable varHighlightedProduct.

Now with a simple change to the Background Color expression –>

if(Product = $(varHighlightedProduct), red(255))

we can use an input box to control the highlighted dimension.

Another way to dynamically control the dimension of interest

The variable method works well enough, but changing the value in the input box requires a little bit of typing. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a list box object in which the end-user could just select the dimension value of interest?? (answer = “YES”)

To build a separate list box we obviously need a data field. That can be easily accomplished with a resident load. Let’s suppose the sales data are stored in a table MySales, and the dimension field for product name is simply called Product. Then our load statement looks like:

HighlightedProduct:

LOAD DISTINCT Product AS [Highlighted Product] RESIDENT MySales;

This will load the unique values of Product into a table called HighlightedProduct with one field, [Highlighted Product].

Next, modify the Background Color expression so that it’s comparing against the selection in [Highlighted Product] –>

if(Product = [Highlighted Product], red(255)).

(You could get fancier with this code…allow multiple selections, restrict the list box to a single value, etc.)

So now we have a very convenient way for the end-user (the Product Manager in this example) to switch the dimension of interest using a simple list box.

I hope you find this simple example useful. Let me know if you have other ideas around this topic!

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Associative search in QlikView v.10 list boxes

Okay, I confess I didn’t really “get” this feature when I saw it in the webex demo. But after seeing it again at Q Days in San Diego last week, the lightbulb finally turned on for me.

I’ll do my best to explain it, but I highly recommend that you go check it out yourself at the QlikView v.10 demo site. The application “What’s New in QV10” is a good place to start.

Direct vs. Associative Search

In version 9 a “simple” search function can be achieved by dropping a search object on the page. And then you can configure the properties to search across all fields or narrow it down to specific fields. This is a very effective tool and end-users love it. But it’s not really associative. By that I mean, it’s a direct search; i.e. if I’ve set up the search object to search in the Salesperson field, then I enter some portion of the Salesperson name in the search box. For example, if I know the salesperson’s name is Sharon something, I type “*sha*” and a list of Salespeople with the substring “sha” in their name shows up. Make sense?

But what if I don’t remember any part of the Salesperson’s name, but I remember some other things associated to the salesperson. Like what they’ve sold. Or to whom they’ve sold …

In version 10 associative search, I can search for Salesperson by entering keywords about other fields that are associated to Salesperson (like Customer, Product, etc.) So in the example above, if I couldn’t even remember any part of the Salesperson’s name, BUT I did remember she works in Germany (Business Unit) and sells Milk (Product) and sells to ActiveDesign (Customer) then I can use associative search and hopefully zero-in on her…

A Use Case

This series of screen shots walk through the scenario I outlined above.

Step 1 – I open the search bar on the Salesperson list box (the magnifying glass) and type “germa”

Step 2 – I click on BusinessUnit_EN = GERMANY

Step 3 – I then type “milk” in the same search bar

Step 4 – I click on Product Sub Group = Milk

Step 5 & 6 – Finally I type “activ” in the search bar and click on Customer = ActiveDesign

Step 7 – with these associations, my list box has been reduced to one value – Sharon Carver –> I have my answer!

Step 8 – Optionally, I can explicitly select Sharon Carver and filter my whole model to her for further analysis

A Couple of Points

  • IMPORTANT – the selections you make in the search list do not affect the rest of the model. In other words, when I selected BusinessUnit_EN = GERMANY in the search box, my dashboard didn’t change. (You can watch the Current Selections to verify that.) I suppose that depending on the scenario this could be slightly inconvenient. But I really find it to be useful, because I don’t want to change my model selections…I just want to find Salesperson = Sharon Carver, in this example.
  • I found myself having to type slower than normal in the search box. Not a big deal, but it took a while to get used to. (Maybe it will be more natural in the final v.10 release.)

So…another great feature for end-users coming in version 10!

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QlikView version 10 – coming soon….

I finally saw the demo of QlikView version 10 this week, presented by Anthony Deighton of QlikTech. And I am chomping at the proverbial bit to get my hands on it. The official launch date is 10/10/10 (cute).

A number of impressive new features are included, and a few in particular stood out

  • Metrics in list boxes – extending the existing feature of allowing a frequency metric in a list box, you can now put in any metric (presumably through the Expression Editor which wasn’t shown). You can even do a microchart. I’m not entirely sure how this is conceptually different from the existing Straight Table object…perhaps the list boxes quicker to configure? At a minimum though, I could this as being a handy feature when profiling new data sources (I’ll take this up in a future blog topic.)
  • Container objects – a great way to better manage screen “real estate.” This will get around the hassle of setting up icon minimize/maximize cycles. And moreover I think the selection options presented in the Container object will be more obvious to business users who are new to any given application.
  • Mekko charts – hmmm… I’m not sure how useful these will be. I mean, I get the fact that now another “degree of freedom” can be encoded in a two-dimensional bar/column chart (by varying the bar width with an additional expression). I get it, bravo, well done. …But, I’m just not sure how easy they will be for the “average bear” to interpret. I’ll be interested to put these in front of some business users and get their feedback.
  • Extensions are a new feature that, well…extend the existing functionality. One of the extensions I could see using is the Gantt chart. The other ones I saw looked like more “eye candy” than anything. I’m sure Stephen Few will have some priceless and spot-on comments on these :)

In addition to gobs of GUI goodness, there are also some impressive changes coming to the ETL scripting and server administration:

  • Multi-threaded reloads – yay! Now I can get my money’s worth on that 16-core processor!
  • Easier user administration in QV Server – my admin will love me!
  • Version control … although, before getting too excited on deploying this, it will certainly need a test drive (check out the commentary at Guerrilla BI).
  • Other improvements to the scripting tool – I heard “type-ahead completion” mentioned, but didn’t catch whether that was to be in v.10 or not

SO…get ready…10/10/10 !

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