No Dumb Buttons

Oh, this your button, huh? A lovely button. Hey baby, you must've been something before electricity.

Listen... do you smell something? Maybe that since my last post, Kill the Button, that I'm on a button jihad? Calm down... how about a Fresca? I'm just trying to get you to stop making crappy* stuff. But this isn't about that, because you already know how to make a button a 'link'. This is a technique I learned from a post by Steve Dark. When you're using your button (link) to show/hide the Current Selections, tell the user if there's nothing selected.

Step One - Read Kill the Button

Make your button (link) that shows and hides the Current Selection box.

Kill the Button

A Priest, a Rabbi and Mormon Missionaries walk into a bar. The bartender says, 'Is this some kind of a joke?'

Half of you are giggling like school girls, half of you are waiting for the punchline, and the rest haven't read this post yet. Because if you have and you're smarter than the average bear, you'd know how funny that is! A simple joke for a simple folk...

Which brings me to one of my ongoing themes... Simplicity. Standard buttons in QlikView are not simple. They look like a blue NyQuil:

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.

Go to Previous Sheet

Many of you use buttons to navigate among your sheets. Have you ever wanted to create a button that takes you back to the sheet you came from?


Easy-peasy.

1. Create a new variable named vSheetFrom
2. On your button that takes you to the new sheet, add a Set Variable action. In the value box, type =GetActiveSheetId()
3. On the second sheet, create a button with a Activate Sheet action. In the value box, type =vSheetFrom

Save and marvel at your cleverness.