List Your Values

We all have our own set of values. Some value love. Some value money. But just so we're clear, in the righteous words of David Lee Roth, money can't buy happiness but it can buy a huge yacht that sails right next to it.

Some value knowledge, but fear that we can't gain it. Fear of our own personal El Guapo. In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. (Shyness is my El Guapo) For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For our fearless leader, JD, being muy guapo is his El Guapo. For all of us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the analysts of MarketStar can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo! Which, translated from traditional Swedish means 'Qlikview'.

Why am I preaching values, you ask? Because I'm going to teach you how create your own list of values, or 'ValueList', if you will.

Twisting the knife in a useful pie chart

Some people think that pie charts will kill kittens and bring the downfall of western civilization. Some people (**deep breaths, be nice, serenity now, woosah**) love pie charts. Since my self control is only so strong, we won't mention 3D pie chart 'people'.

Everyone knows that I'm firmly in the first camp, but I'm nothing if not flexible and tolerant of other people's stupid viewpoints. Which brings me grudgingly to the fact that I've recently read a couple of posts that point out good uses of pie charts (Jorge Camoes & Francis Gagnon). The gist is that pie charts are good for part to whole comparisons. Please notice that 'part' is singular, not plural. Let's apply this to Qlikview.

You can't nullify machine guns and el Caminos

Someday I want to be badass enough to rescue a damsel in distress by shooting a machine gun from the hip while riding in the bed of an el Camino that's fishtailing through a dirt parking lot.

Until then, I'll have to settle for opening day of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and publishing awesome Qlikview tips. And being really, really, ridiculously funny.

I can't think of a clever way to tease this tip, but it will let you remove a value from a table, but still keep nulls. Here's the scenario:

We're displaying opportunity details in a straight table. One of the fields contains 'reasons for close'. One of those reasons is 'duplicate'. But since we want to show both open and closed opportunities that aren't closed because they're duplicates, we can't easily use set analysis since it won't gracefully handle the nulls.

To make this work, we'll create three variables, a calculated dimension and a button.

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.