Qlik Sense at a glance

This introduction gives you an overview of Qlik Sense fundamentals.

What can you do in Qlik Sense?

Most Business Intelligence (BI) products can help you answer questions that are understood in advance. But what about your follow-up questions? The ones that come after someone reads your report or sees your visualization? With the Qlik Sense associative experience, you can answer question after question after question, moving along your own path to insight. With Qlik Sense you can explore your data freely, with just clicks, learning at each step along the way and coming up with next steps based on earlier findings.

How does Qlik Sense work?

Qlik Sense generates views of information on the fly for you. Qlik Sense does not require predefined and static reports or you being dependent on other users – you just click and learn. Every time you click, Qlik Sense instantly responds, updating every visualization and view in the app with a newly calculated set of data and visualizations specific to your selections.

The app model

The app is at the core of Qlik Sense.

Instead of deploying and managing huge business applications, you can create your own Qlik Sense apps that you can reuse, modify and share with others. The app model helps you ask and answer the next question on your own, without having to go back to an expert for a new report or visualization.

An app consists of one or more sheets containing visualizations. Visualizations are charts, tables and similar representations of your data together with other information. By making selections in your visualizations you can analyze the information to make your own discoveries and gain insights about your data.

See: Apps

Building an app

In Qlik Sense, anyone can create an app. Although apps can be used for many different purposes, building an app includes some common steps: loading data from files or databases, and creating visualizations on sheets. For apps that are to be shared with others, you can create reusable visualizations and other items that will speed up further development of the apps.

See: Creating your first app

The associative selection model (green/white/gray)

Discovering connections between data sets is one of the fundamental concepts in Qlik Sense. As you click, associated data values are highlighted. Selections are highlighted in green, associated data is represented in white, and excluded (unassociated) data appears in gray. This instant feedback enables you to think of new questions and continue to explore and discover.

In the following example, the selected (green) decade value 1910s gives you possible (white) values 1914 to 1919 to refine your selection further. The values 1920, 1921 and 1922 are marked dark gray (excluded) as they are not part of the selected decade 1910s. The light gray decade values, 1920s to 1990s, are alternative values that would have been possible (white) if a selection had not already been made in that (Decade) field.

See: The associative selection model

Navigating and interacting in Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a web-based application with a number of different modes and views to work in, depending on whether you are loading data, analyzing data, or telling stories with data. There are touch and mouse gestures, as well as keyboard shortcuts to get to know. You might also want to know how to set up Qlik Sense for different languages.

See: Navigate and interact

Sheets and visualizations

A sheet can be thought of as a page in an app. A sheet contains visualizations of your data. Visualizations can be made from charts, such as pie charts, bar charts and tables, as well as text and image elements, and selection filter panes. By structuring your app with different sheets representing different aspects of your data, you make it easier to make decisions about what you want to analyze.

With visualizations, you can work directly with the data you see. You can easily drill down into visualizations to understand your data. In visualizations you can discover outliers, patterns, trends, and correlations that are not visible in simple rows and columns.

See: Sheets

See: Visualizations

Develop and discover with apps

Qlik Sense enables you to develop apps that use data loaded from multiple data sources, which can be structured in a data model. The data model is the basis on which you build your apps, with their sheets, visualizations and stories.

You can prepare and share your apps with other users. By creating reusable elements, you can simplify your colleagues’ and partners’ own exploration of the data, and speed up their finding of their own discoveries and insights.

After you have shared an app with others, they can explore your app on computers or mobile devices. They can make selections in the data visualizations in the app, and they can also create their own sheets and visualizations to make further discoveries. If they want to share their insights with other users, they can do so by creating stories using the data storytelling feature.

See: Create

Sharing and collaborating

Qlik Sense is developed with collaboration in mind and provides tools to help create a common understanding to support decisions and influence others.

See: Collaborate

Using Qlik Sense Cloud

Qlik Sense Cloud is a solution for sharing Qlik Sense apps, so that you can collaborate with others and make data discoveries together. Additionally, users can access the cloud and the apps from any device, including mobile devices, with an Internet connection and a modern web browser.

Using data storytelling

Data storytelling is an innovative feature that allows you to communicate your insights by putting snapshots of visualizations on slides in a story that you share. You can add stylistic elements and comments to the slides and the snapshots, and organize them into a story for communication with others.

The snapshots in your story retain the data from the date and time the story was created, but you are not limited to history; you can quickly get to the live versions for further analysis.

You can use stories to build a narrative around the data and emphasize elements of it to create convincing arguments to support you and your stakeholders in decision making. Data storytelling opens up the possibility for questions at any time, and it will help to highlight or reveal the answers to these questions.