Help me Rhonda

There were a lot of good things about the '80s. Apple Macintosh. Yugo. Fall of the Berlin Wall. Cyndi Lauper. Die Hard. My Gold Medal at the 1980 Summer Olympics. Ronald Reagan. Brits kickin' it in the Falklands Islands. DeLorean DMC-12. MTV. Pac-Man.

Unfortunately, the Beach Boys concert at Park West in 1982 was not one of them.

Help me Rhonda! I spent 12 bucks to see a virtual Bear Country Jamboree? There's no way those dudes were still alive! Animatronics DO NOT ROCK! Van Halen ROCKS! But don't get me started on Van Hagar...

Which brings me to the simple fact that I learn new QlikView things because people come to me for help. The latest was a request to only show the top 50 partners (in sales) no matter what filters were selected. On its face it's a reasonable and simple request. As a sales manager, I really don't care about the ankle-biters. I only want to see the Partners that make a difference.

Then I started to ponder the details.

That's some next level button!

One of the knocks on dashboards is that they give you some good information on what is or what was, but don't help you know what to do. In a sales organization, 'what to do' generally means pipeline management. A typical pipeline tab might look something like:

Nice and clean, right? Some good spot info along the top. The stacked bar chart is a nice histogram of your possible future revenue. Finally, some detail info at the bottom. The end user can click around, filter down to their territory, and see some good info. They are practicing 'data discovery' just like we want them to.

You sit back, proud of yourself, thinking, "You recognize the skills, so I don't want nobody calling me son or kid or sport or nothing like that." But there's some next level stuff going on slick, and I need to tell you something about all your skills. As of right now, they mean precisely... zilch.

The next level is to help your users get to actionable info and give them a reason to come back as often as possible. In this case, one click to show the opportunities that are close to close. For this, 'close to close' is defined as an opportunity that has an anticipated close date that is less than 30 days from today.

List of Actions

A list of Actions and their descriptions:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_5TC7G8rWdKajZWTlB0WFV6MWc/edit

Easily Translate Comments

Hat tip to Jared Hatch for this awesomeness...

How many of you get comments in foreign languages? Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch... Wouldn't it be nice to simply click a button for a translation? For just three payments of $39.95, you, too, can have this power. But, wait! There's more!

Select Excluded

Many of you use buttons to select a list box item:

Did you know that you can easily select everything BUT an item?