Hyperlink it!

Have you ever wanted to link to your CRM? Maybe a web site? From a table?

(For those of you who are not lucky enough to work at MarketStar, this example uses PartnerDynamics or 'PD'. MarketStar built PD to be the best partner relationship manager in the business.)

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!

m*Sight Training

Link to the PowerPoint from today's training:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_5TC7G8rWdKQ1dha0wxandqckk/edit

My (non-religious but you should live them religiously) 10 Commandments

Whether we like it or not, presentation is almost as important as your data, conclusions or recommendations. Users will decide the worthiness of your work immediately based on their first impression and they will continue to judge as they go. In that spirit, let me present my ten commandments of design.

DON'T EVER DO THIS!

I know, two days in a row. In some countries, it would be considered spam. Communist countries.

But this is important. You should never do this. Ever. Unless you have express written approval from me. It does, however spotlight a creative way to use Qlikview. Consider this your express written approval to test this, but not to publish.

Enter:

=if(Odd(Second(Now(1))),Cyan(),Yellow())

Into any object’s background color. It will make it blink from cyan to yellow and back every second. Variations of the commands can be used for things like scrolling text, changing comments in a text box, etc. . A possibly positive use might be to blink the caption on an important warning, such as a known data problem.

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. The fancy-pants among you might want to attribute this to Voltaire, be we all know it’s about Spiderman.

Hat tip to QlikView Maven for this trick.

Design Choices

Back in the 90s, I took a photography class. I loved it. Exposure, f-stops, focal length, mixing chemicals, dodge and burn, zone system, doing things in the dark. Which is weird, considering that photography is all about the light. With all the science and math involved in great photography, guess what the best tip to a good picture was? Frame your shot, then take one step closer. It simplifies your shot and keeps what’s important in the picture.

What's this have to do with dashboarding*? It seems we have a parallel path to better communicate the importance of our data. We have an immense amount of information at our fingertips, and the temptation is to show as much as possible.

Give your rows breathing space

This tip is about as easy as it gets, but it’s a great way to improve the look, feel and usability of your tables, especially if they only have a few rows. When you create a table, the default is to get something like:

The rows are mashed up and everything looks dense. To add some space, open the Chart Properties and go to the Presentation tab. At the bottom right, check the box ‘Wrap Cell Text’.

Bam! You have a table that feels much lighter:

Variables as Aggregators

Dashboards tend to be a compromise between space and information. Anything we can do to optimize our use of space will make our dashboards more useful and valuable. A good way to optimize your space is to use variables as your aggregators.

An example is the use of Sum and Average. Currently, if we want the user to be able to see both and save space, we’ll use a container or a button with conditional show. The problem with these methods is that you have to maintain two or more charts to keep them in sync.

Set Analysis with an Intersection

Every once in a while I come across a tip that makes me want to want to punch myself  break something  say ‘ah shucks’ because it’s so easy and it’s always bugged me.

Null Values

Some of my most frequent questions concern null values. How do I count them? How do I show them? The short answer is ‘you don’t’ because you’re trying to show or count nothingness. But there ways around the problem.