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.