Fightin' the Good Fight... On Pies.

Pies make great weapons. Delicious, nutritious weapons. They make stupid charts. Evil, lame, boring charts. And we all know that pie charts kill kittens.

So, in the words of Nancy Reagan, "Just Say No". Unless you're in Colorado or Washington. Then just say, "Dave's not here, man". Take some time, put a little thought into it, and you can come up with a much better illustration of your data.

Good vs Evil (or "How to confuse with a poor bar chart")

There's good and there's bad. And then there's BAD:

And since the Muscles from Brussels knows no bounds, he played both good and bad in his Oscar-worthy masterpiece, Double Impact.

And since we sometimes refuse to channel our inner van Damme, we create bad bar charts:

We've all done it. Sales by Year by Month. Lots of colors. Lots of data. Almost no insight. This is your Double Team where you make Dennis Rodman look like a real actor. We can fix it, just like they fixed Jean-Claude in Universal Soldier.

The Magic of the Princess Bride

One of the greatest things about being a dad is making your son -- who was brought up on a steady diet of Call of Duty, John McClane, Dutch, and "did you check to see if it's loaded?!?!" -- watch The Princess Bride.

The transformation from "ha ha dad that's funny" to "horrified" to "pleading 'no don't make me do this!'" to "you're not my dad, what did you do with my dad!?!?" to "resignation" to "this is funny!" is almost too much to bear.

And now I bear the responsibility of sharing some QlikView awesomeness with all of you...

Hey FontFace!

It's 1977. I'm fourteen. At a church dance. With girls.

They've played Dream On by Aerosmith (oddly appropriate) and I was too scared to move. Frampton Shows Me The Way, but who to ask? Then it happened. Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven spins up and a girl asks me to dance! An older girl. To a slow song. 14 year old nirvana! Then, disaster! The darn song speeds up in the middle and we have to let go and fast dance! What do I do with my arms? And my legs? Oh my gosh, my legs!

And now you know how I feel when you use a mishmash of fonts. Confused. Just pick one and use it.

Scenario: One Bar Chart, One Tab

Question: How many places can you change the font?

Answer: Only counting the buttons that say 'Font', I count ELEVEN! Even more if you consider things like Expression Attributes.

Result: A plethora of ways to crap-up* your interface on even the simplest dashboard.

Let's go through them one by one.

Dollars or Units?

Yesterday was 'Talk Like a Pirate Day'. I didn't post this yesterday because I was going to try out some sweet pirate pick up lines on my wife and didn't want to spoil her amazement at my smoothness...

Which means that I risked a mutiny because you had to wait a day for the bounty of my treasure of knowledge.

Just like a good pirate can choose the best weapon - Cutlass or Blunderbuss - you need to give your user a choice between the best information to run their business. Today, we'll learn how to give them the option of seeing their sales in either dollars or units all in the same chart.

Luckily, this even easy enough for an analyst with a grog hangover.

Map It!

My youthful wrinkles and gray hair have not spared me from the horrible anguish of ageism perpetrated against me. So, to prove you youngsters wrong and that I'm hip to that jive, let me quote from the philosopher of your generation,  Selena Gomez:

"The trips we dreamed of takin', the tags left on the map, what happened to that? What happened to that?"

While I refuse to listen to it, I'm sure that it's a national treasure. So, Carpe Diem Baby, hug the curve, lose the time, tear the map, and shoot the sign.

My segue skills are almost exhausted, so here it is. Add a map to your dashboard. Just do it.

Life's Mysteries

"Why do hot dogs come in packages of ten, but hot dog buns only come in packages of just eight?"

This, one of life's most foundational mysteries, is only eclipsed by "How the heck do I get started on this dashboard?"

Like the Monk With No Name, I'm here for you. And I sense somehow that you have potential, even though those around you think you are full of, well, you know. Just remember, rich manure can fertilize fields which will feed millions.

When we start a new project, it's often difficult to know what the developers built into the script. We tend to float between the table viewer, a bunch of list boxes that we constantly create and delete and change, and maybe the SQL. Then we build a chart or two trying to see what the heck is in the data model. Here's an easy temporary tool you can build that will give you a view into your data while you're building your masterpiece.

Share It!

I'm as guilty, maybe more guilty, as anyone. I love to build the most clever analytical wingding to ever grace the presence of the lowly sales manager's desktop. Witness 'Color Me Crazy' or 'Perfect Probability Pipeline'. That stuff is genius!

But, believe it or not, your users suffer through your creativity in order to get something done. Like selling something that pays your exorbitant salary. It's time to help them.

You can't have two number ones

You can't have two number ones. 'Cause that would be eleven.

Truer words have never been uttered. It's time to help our users highlight the Number One. Some of you may be wondering why you're not seeing a picture of Jet Li. That's just because you haven't learned the wisdom of Cal Naughton, Jr. And you're only beginning to understand the sagaciousness of DJ m*Sight Mike.

It's time to easily, effectively and understatedly highlight your top value in a table.

The challenge is helping your user to easily see what's important. In the example above, it's pretty easy to see that Toronto has the highest sales. But what if the list is 50 cities long? And the values are all roughly the same? Don't make your users hunt through a bunch of data. Point out the answer!

Why didn't I know about ColorBrewer?

There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked. So’s I spent most of my time looking for beer. And ways to kill all of the bright colors in your apps. With kindness.

Then the folks over at EagerEyes.Org put together a really good post on rainbows and (I think) unicorns. Did you know that unicorns poop mini marshmallows? And not the plain ones, the colorful ones. Then they casually threw out the quote:

"Everybody in visualization knows ColorBrewer. Everybody. It’s almost silly to link to it again here, because it’s so widely known."

I didn't know about it! And we all know that I'm not just anybody. I'm obviously not everybody. But apparently I'm almost silly.

So, here it is. It's the easiest to use that I've found. http://colorbrewer2.org/ :

But more importantly, you want to know how to WRECK a movie, eh? Take a jar of months into the theater, eh and let .. and then like uh release them at a point in the movie when you know what’s going to happen, eh and then all of the moths will fly up to the projection booth window and cloud it up and you can demand your money back.

Sparkline Some Confusion

Just remember what ol' FortuneCookie Mike does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, FortuneCookie Mike just looks that big ol' storm right square in the eye and he says, "Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it."

Except when you present the wrong picture causing your users to make bad decisions. I can't take that.

Color me Crazy

Every smart person loved my post on Highlighting the Trend. It's the sane alternative to a crazy line chart with a bunch of dumb, indistinguishable colors. Unfortunately, there are a few (communists, one-worlders, salespeople) who asked the question, "why aren't all of the lines different colors?"

Well, it got so that every piss-ant prairie punk who thought he could make a graph would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid. I must have charted more data than Cecil B. DeMille. It got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word "draw" in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street when I heard a voice behind me say, "Reach for it, mister!" I spun around... and there I was, face to face with a six-year old kid. Well, I just threw my data down and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass. So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle... and I've been there ever since.

So, I give up. You can have your darn colors. I just refuse to not add a twist that might actually help make them useful. In the spirit of Highlighting the Trend, clicking on a value will grey out the remaining lines.

The One

I don't need to know you. "You" only need to know "me". I will be The One!

Jet Li. China's closest thing to Chuck Norris. Good thing for Jet Li that I'm not Chinese because then I'd be China's closest thing to Chuck Norris. Did you know that Chuck once ran around the world so fast that he hit himself in the back of the head? That's kind of how I felt when it dawned on me how to use the '1' in set analysis when you really just want 'one' of your list boxes to act on an object. The fog parted like butter cutting through a hot knife. Like ghosts sitting around a campfire telling Chuck Norris stories, put on your brave face and follow along...

Perfect Probability Pipeline

The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? The 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 had it all - a weak V6, leaky doors, rear window louvers, coke in the spare tire, and stainless steel!

Just to be clear, I'm not linking the 'pipe' in pipeline to the extra-curricular profit pursuits of John DeLorean or the classic guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix.

What I am saying is that if you don't build some style into your pipeline, you'll be ignored like a Chrysler K-car.

In the last post, we learned how to create actions that help the user to focus their activity on the right opportunity. This time, we'll help them fine tune their forecasts.

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.

Better List Boxes

You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things, and then wonders why his life sucks? Well... that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner. Karma. That's when I realized I had to change. So, I made a list of every bad report I've ever done and, one by one I'm going to make up for all my mistakes. I'm just trying to be a better analyst. My name is Mike.

# 48,408,730 on my list is creating boring List Boxes. Every dashboard out there has something like this:

While it's a useful tool and let's your users filter and experience Qlikview's associative power, it's really boring. And to top it off, that bold, blue caption bar screams, "I'm important!" As all faithful FortuneCookieBI fans know, screaming is only for actually important things, not for captions. See what I did there?

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.