Circle Takes the Square

Did you ever think to yourself, "Why was Paul Lynde always the center square? What's wrong with Soupy Sales? And for hell's sake, shouldn't Charo be the center of everyone's game show universe?"

If you did, then you were also alive the last time I posted a tip. So, quicker than you can say 'cuchi cuchi', here's your Tip:

Make a Round Text Object

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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’.

Container to Align, Size & Format

The Zen philosopher Basha once wrote, 'A flute with no holes is not a flute. A donut with no hole is a Danish.' He didn't say, ‘Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left,’ but it does.

Which brings me to my point. Follow my (non-religious but you should live them religiously) 10 Commandments.

Expression Attributes

We all have endearing attributes. Even me. My most endearing attribute is my humbleness. And my calves. You're most endearing attribute? You're willingness to obey my every command. That's nice.

Qlikview allows you to apply custom formatting to expressions. Maybe you want a dashed line instead of a solid line. Done. Your line is too skinny? Don't be stupid. Make it fat. Black text is so boring. How about grey? Speaking of grey, if you can guess the number of grey hairs that I have, you win a prize. Not a good prize.

I'm pretty sure that I'm up for the Congressional Medal of Honor because of FortuneCookieBI. Now, that's a prize!

Conditional Columns

One of the big issues we deal with is the lack of space in our dashboards. We tend to busy-up things by squeezing too much into a limited space. Stop it! there's a better way.  It's like magic.

Trellis Charts

Don’t make a chart like this! I dare you to try to make sense of it. You can’t. I’m not even going to try to list its faults. But its biggest fault is that it makes me angry. You wouldn’t like when I’m angry.

We can fix it.

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.)

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.