QlikView-A Data Visualization Tool

Session 9

Date:  19th March,2013

An infographics/data visualization tool that I have studied and found highly sophisticated yet user-friendly is QlikView.

The QlikView Business Discovery platform delivers true self-service BI that empowers business users by driving innovative decision-making.

Features:

This is one of the most practiced data visualization tool which enables the user to

• Consolidating relevant data from multiple sources into a single application
• Exploring the associations in the data
• Enabling social decision making through secure, real-time collaboration
• Visualizing data with engaging, state-of-the-art graphics
• Searching across all data—directly and indirectly
• Interacting with dynamic apps, dashboards and analytics
• Accessing, analyzing and capturing data from mobile devices

The QlikView Difference over others

• Has an inference engine that maintains the associations in the data automatically
• Calculates aggregations on the fly, as needed, for a super-fast user experience
• Compresses data down to 10% of its original size to optimize the power of the processors
• Accomplishes both within a single, comprehensive product

Go to http://ap.demo.qlikview.com/download/.

Install the application with valid credential.

The home screen looks like:

Choose any supported file.

I have chose an excel containing few NIFTY historical data as follows:

Date	Open	High	Low	Close	Shares Traded	Turnover (Rs. Cr)
1-Oct-12	5704.75	5722.95	5694	5718.8	123138510	4798.17
3-Oct-12	5727.7	5743.25	5715.8	5731.25	165037864	6654.02
4-Oct-12	5751.55	5807.25	5751.35	5787.6	171404290	6954.74
5-Oct-12	5815	5815.35	4888.2	5746.95	255569804	12995.8
8-Oct-12	5751.85	5751.85	5666.2	5676	142319000	5853.56
9-Oct-12	5708.15	5728.65	5677.9	5704.6	119300415	5047.01
10-Oct-12	5671.15	5686.5	5647.05	5652.15	126294361	4564.39

After loading the data there are several types of visualization options avalible like

Bar chart

Line chart

Combo chart

Scatter chart

Grid chart

Straight Table

Pivot Table

I made use of some of the above mentioned charts to came out some observations:

Fig 1:

Fig 2:

Fig 3:

Some of the features where QlikView lacks are

•  Qlikview works perfectly when the size of the database is small but in practical cases the database is never small.
•  Alerts- Capability to create alerts and delivers it to not only Email but blackberries, hand held devices, mobile phones etc
•  Multiuser development environment- This feature allows multiple developers work on a single project and the utility synchronizes the pieces of project each developer is working with the main project. Qlikview completely lacks this feature.
• Connect and extract data from multidimensional objects.
• Support for advance features like embedded browser(available in Hyperion Interactive reporting), flickers(rolling messages) etc as an standard options.