If there was just one question I could ask at this year’s Qonnections 2011, it would be this…
When are we going to see improvements to the most basic QlikView task: displaying data?
Look at the following examples from competitors…
Above is a Spotfire chart that cleanly displays a 2-level hierarchy of dimension values on the x-axis. Increase to 3 levels and the labels stay organized and readable.
Below is a chart from Tableau.
The axis labels are only shown at the left and the bottom of the entire trellis. QlikView shows axis labels on each square, adding unnecessary clutter that is not easy to remove. Two dimension values are coded in the size of the dots and their color. Tableau also uses color gradients easily and effectively.
Tableau and Spotfire put a lot of energy into making displays clean and readable. Tableau makes excellent guesses at how to display your data.
QlikView’s charts have felt clunky for years. The Chart building dialog is huge, confusing and too often doesn’t work as expected. Charts don’t adapt well to being small. Axis labels cram into each other, don’t split lines, and don’t respect chart settings. Legends use excessive real estate, have limited positioning with no intelligence and don’t split text. Expression cycles are confusing for end-users. Fonts and colors are buried 3 levels deep. “Themes” exclude certain chart elements, requiring the developer to dive deep into menus to make targeted changes. Scatter plots quickly become a messy jumble of points and labels. Removing scatter plot data point labels makes identifying a data point a painful task of color matching.
There doesn’t seem to be any point in discussing geospatial data, for which QlikView has no native abilities. QlikTech has been frustratingly quiet on this. Want to include Google Maps? You’re welcome to search for code in the community, or pay more for third-party tools. Meanwhile, the competitors’ native support is easy and attractive.
QlikView is still the best tool out there for “getting things done”. Graphical display is one of a few areas where QlikView is lagging. But QlikView is too far behind at this point. Charts have not been overhauled since at most version 7. It’s time for a major leap forward.