Invariably Ignored

Harold Ramis died this week. Most of you are saying to yourself, "Aw, that's sad... Now remind me who he is?"

Without Harold, modern society wouldn't be possible.

He wrote, directed, produced or starred in the most important films of all time. Caddyshack. Vacation. Year One. Animal House. Ghostbusters. Heavy Metal. Stripes.

Not to mention the most hated, most reviled, worst movie ever, Groundhog Day. I'm not kidding. Don't watch it. If you have watched it, forget it. Delete it from Wikipedia's Harold Ramis page. If you see it in the store, yell at the store manager and throw every copy in the trash. Then find Bill Murray and Zombieland his ass. Then do it all again. And again. And again.

Ignore it. Just like you need to ignore fields with your set analysis.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Variables as Expressions

If you use the same expression over and over in your document, you will love this tip! Take a look and if you have any questions on how to implement it, let me know.