Discovering and analyzing

When you have created your document and loaded data into it, you can start using it for data discovery and analysis. You can perform analysis for different reasons and using a variety of tools.

Selections

Making selections is the main interaction method in QlikView. Selections filter out a subset of the data that has been loaded into QlikView.

You use selections to investigate something you want to know more about, and QlikView responds by color-coding the possible and excluded values associated with your selections.

Routine analysis

A typical activity in routine analysis is to follow up on key metrics (KPI) regularly, for example:

• Total sales against quota, each morning
• Total sales against total sales the same period last year
• Orders placed but not delivered at the end of the week
• Sales per region on a certain day each month

Let us suppose you have data representing sales over time. You can then limit your data to only show the sales during a certain month. Next, you might want to show only the data during the following month, to see how the sales have developed.

Exploratory analysis

QlikView lets you explore the data in different ways to find new insights, for example by:

• Filtering the data efficiently by making multiple selections
• Asking and answering what-if questions with comparative analysis

• Clicking or tapping anywhere for new views or more detail

• Remixing and reassembling data any way you want to

Searching in the data

You can use the QlikView universal search tool, which takes advantage of fuzzy logic to find all potential matches.

Analytic connections

With analytic connections you are able to integrate external analysis with your business discovery. An analytic connection extends the expressions you can use in load scripts and charts by calling an external calculation engine (when you do this, the calculation engine acts as a server-side extension (SSE)). For example, you could create an analytic connection to R, and use statistical expressions when you load the data.

Bookmarking selections

You can keep track of selections you have made or frequently make, by saving your selection states as bookmarks.