Maxed out

Today is Valentine's Day. Tomorrow you will be crushed by a 143,000 ton asteroid. It's worth almost $200 BILLION, so you should be able to rebuild your deck and get a new hot tub. Maybe even an name-brand Jacuzzi ! The only problem is that you only have a 1 in 3 Trillion chance of cashing in. Better if your house is bigger.

Movoto

While you're waiting, let's learn a new tidbit about the Max function.

Fact: Bears eat beets

It's April first. Your sales manager, Joe McImpatientpants, pulls up his dashboard and immediately calls you. Through the screams of how crappy your dashboard is, you divine that he's looking at the 'Current Quarter' tab. He's upset that everything is '0'! You take a deep breath to try to explain to him that his sales are '0' because it's the start of a new quarter and there haven't been any sales reported yet. You, of course, fail at this explanation because Joe McImpatientpants looks bad because his sales are '0'! Fix it, dammit! He forgot to slam his hand on his desk, so you don't take it seriously.

Since you're an analyst and you were hired because you always think you're right, you politely say that you'll fix it, hang up the phone, and call Joe McImpatientpants a few choice words under your breath.

Breathe. Smile. But not like a crazy person. More like Gandhi or a cat. But not like a monkey. Because showing your monkey teeth is a submission signal. When someone smiles at me with their monkey teeth, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life.

To fix it, we'll show the previous quarter's data for the first couple of weeks, then switch it to current quarter.

Vizualize

Qliktech put out a technical brief on visualizations that is a pretty good read. But like everything else, except for what I teach you, it has some things I disagree with. And because, let's face it. You gotta be a man to wear tights!

• Some of the visualizations aren't available in Qlikview without running an extension. (Bullet charts, arrow charts)
• Page 5 - Implies that a speedometer gauge shouldn't be used and that one of it's biggest flaws is that it doesn't show a trend. While I agree that it uses a lot of space for a little information, if used skillfully (and sparingly) it can give the business user a quick look into the 'health' of a particular metric.
• Page 8 - Amen!
• Page 9 - Take this advice on Mekko charts and apply it to all area-type charts. It is difficult, if not impossible to interpret the areas of differently shaped objects.
• Page 10 - I agree that tables shouldn't be used on a dashboard, but we don't just build dashboards. m*Sight is also a reporting tool. Use tables as a backup to your visualization.
• Page 13 - Values inside your bars is OK and an efficient use of space, if your users don't need the detail in the shorter segments. A good option is to use Fast Change to allow the user to quickly see a table.
• Page 15 - 7 is too many segments for a pie chart. 
• Page 15 - 'Others' in a pie chart should not drill down. The drill down will show proportions to the 'Others' group and not to the whole. 

Splitsville (for fields)

Often, date fields are stored with a time stamp that is irrelevant. An Employee Start Date might be stored as:

         1/26/2009 12:00:00 AM

But the only relevant data is:

          1/26/2009

Because you really don't care (and it wasn't recorded) what time the employee started. The best way to deal with this is to have the field brought into the app stripped of the time stamp.

My philosophy? A hundred-dollar shine on a three-dollar pair of shoes.

So let's fix it on the front end. It's easy.

Highlight the Trend, Part Deux

Well I guess it all started the first time I went through the second grade. I caught my reflection in a spoon while I was eating my cereal, and I remember thinking "wow, you're not like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree. Richard Gere's a real hero of mine. Sting. Sting would be another person who's a hero. The music he's created over the years, I don't really listen to it, but the fact that he's making it, I respect that. I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I'm selling? No. Do I know what I'm doing today? No. But I'm here, and I'm gonna give it my best shot."

Which brings me to:

     if([City] = '$(=GetFieldSelections([City]))', Green(), ARGB(150,225,225,225))

Definitely not my best shot.

Highlight the Trend

Because I went to the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, I can now teach you really, really, ridiculously good Qlikview tricks.

This one's no different. It's a good way to cut through the clutter of a chart that displays a large number of lines.

Line charts are great tools for showing trends over time. Your user can easily visualize whether the data is getting better or worse by the shape of the chart. They are not good for charting distinct categories. A good example of a bad idea is to use a line chart to show sales by territory. A proper example is to chart sales over time, split up by city.

Scope Your Project!

Disney bought Lucasfilm for 4 BILLION DOLLARS. That proves their most prophetic quote in their most important movie, Spaceballs:

“So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

Since you're not dumb – which you proved by knowing all about Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham’s Johari Window – you want to use a scope document when creating your Qlikview apps. The template outline below will make it easy and help you gather the pieces you need for success. You can also download a MarketStar-branded version from my Google Drive.

Overview

This is a short overview of Qlikview project. Include target audience, data sources, goals, questions to be answered, risks, and high level timeline. Use this section as an Executive Overview. Make sure that it can be used as an ‘elevator pitch’.