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.
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I would have to agree, QV is starting to fall behind.
For a novice, just creating a crosstab table is hard, but in Tableau it is built right in.
Highlighting by colour, again hard and complex, but so easy in other products.
You and I pondered this at the 2008 Qonnections conference.
Completely agree. QlikView delivers on the ease of use promise with its associative logic, but doesn’t close the deal at the user interface. They’ve done the harder part (an expressive query interface in front of an in-memory database) which Tableau and Spotfire haven’t done, but haven’t prioritized the UI enough. You can even see that in their own web site, which is confusing to navigate and use.
Agree with the comments, Qlikview doesnt have the graphical “wow” factor that Spotfire or Tableaux has – makes it more difficult to sell internally as well when the charting is fairly bland – suprised Qliktech dont realise that?
We started with Tableau and have transitioned to Qlikview for dsahboards but are still using Tableau for ad-hoc analytics. Here’s a summary of our experience with the two products:
Ad-hoc analysis:
- Tableau’s graphics are more intuitive to build and more expressive. You build the graphics via a drag and drop UI on the fly as you perform your analysis. Much better than Qlikviews graphics building UI which is a series of windows with a complex set of checkbox and drop down choices. With Qlikview it’s best to start out knowing what your graphic needs to look like and then you have to figure out which switches to flip to get you graphic to show up the way you want it. With Tableau it’s easier to just start exploring until you get a graphic that really tells a story.
- Tableau does a better job of automatically choosing size and positioning of graphic elements like labels, axes, legends, colum widths, etc. As an analyst you spend less time resizing and repositioning graphical elements to make the graphics readable.
- Tableau used to severe query performance problems with large data sets. Their most recent version includes an in-memory database which significantly reduced this problem but we still have some spots of query slowness in Tableau, primarily when we have several user-selectable data filter controls applied to a graph and in some cases when we have complex formulas which reference distinct count functions. We have replicated these graphs in Qlikview and the Qlikview versions don’t suffer the same performance issues.
Dashboards:
- Qlikview’s query performance is faster and more consistent. A Tableau dashboard’s refresh time gets painful (more than 10 seconds) if you place more than a few individual tables and graphs on it even with the new version’s in-memory database. After reviewing Tableau’s log files it appears that Tableau can take as much as a few seconds to calculate the layout of each graphical element on a dashboard page when the data changes as a result of the user changing their filter selections. We don’t see the same problem with Qlikview. We see page refresh times of no more than 2 seconds even on dashboards with 10 to 15 individual tables and charts on them.
- Qlikview allows for fine-grained control of the size and positioning of graphical elements on a page. Tableau allows you to place graphical elements relative to each other but not to specify exact size and placement on the dashboard.
- Qlikview allows for more complex navigation between dashboard pages. Hard to describe this one – Let’s just say that Qlikview allows you to build buttons and other navigation controls that trigger custom scripts. This makes it possible to make Qliiview dashboards that act more like an application than just a set of pages with linites cross-page navigation.
- Qlikview dashboards take a lot longer to build than their Tableau equivalents bit in the end you get much better performance and a better looking and functioning “analytical application”.
If only the best features of each product could be combined into a single product. Until then, we’ll keep using Tableau for ad-hoc analysis where it really shines and we’ll use Qlikview for dashboards.