Qlik Sense April 2020

Over the past few releases, Qlik Sense has slowly been filling the feature gap between itself and QlikView. The brand-new feature-packed Qlik Sense April 2020 release is no different, with multiple fan-favourite QlikView features appearing in Qlik Sense.

Read on for a full rundown of the new features.

ORGANISATION CHART

The visualisation bundle was originally included with the Qlik Sense February 2019 release, and many of us will have become accustomed to using these additional objects within our dashboards during the last year. Qlik have been adding additional objects into this bundle since its initial release, and the latest addition is a good one.

The new Org Chart extension allows you to show cards in a hierarchy, such as a company hierarchy, or a product range. Clicking on the numbers below, each card allows you to expand/collapse the additional cards further down in the hierarchy.

ABILITY TO SHARE BOOKMARKS

Previously, users could create their own bookmarks within a published application; but these remained private. The only way users could see the same bookmarks was if the Developer added the bookmarks before publishing the application. This made sharing insights particularly cumbersome, with long emails of “select this, select that.”

But that’s not all! It’s now also possible to save the sheet location, which will take the user to the sheet the bookmark was created on, and also save the layout, which will save the layout of a pivot table if edited.

Once your bookmark is created, you will see it under “My Bookmarks”. You can right click on this bookmark and click “Publish.” This will allow all users of the application to see your bookmark. You can also copy the link and send this to another user directly.

RELATIVE MODIFIER

The Qlik Sense February 2020 release brought us new modifiers for certain chart types. The Qlik Sense April 2020 release provides us with yet another new modifier, the relative modifier. This allows Qlik Users to quickly create a measure showing the percentage or share of a total.

The relative modifier is currently available for the Bar, Combo, Line and Table charts.

SHEET TRIGGERS

Sheet triggers are one of the most requested features to be migrated from QlikView into Qlik Sense. For users unfamiliar with QlikView, sheet triggers allow you to add actions that are applied when a user navigates onto a specific sheet.

For example, a bookmark, variable, or selections may need to be set if a user navigates onto a specific sheet. The addition of sheet triggers into Qlik Sense drastically improves its guided analytics capability.

Within the sheet properties menu, while in edit mode, a new tab has been added to the accordion menu named “Actions.” Under this tab, you will see a wide array of actions such as applying a bookmark, setting a variable, clearing selections, setting values in a field and locking selections.

PIVOT IMPROVEMENTS

The Pivot Table also has a selection of new improvements included within the April 2020 release.

The first is that it’s now possible to store the pivot table layout within a bookmark, this means that when the bookmark is applied, the current pivot table layout will change to the layout that was active when the bookmark was initially created. This helps avoid confusion if the pivot table is arranged differently across users.

The second improvement is a new sorting option. The pivot chart, by default, is sorted by dimensions. It is now possible to sort by the first measure, if this option is enabled, this will precede any other sorting options applied.

TABLE IMPROVEMENTS

As with the pivot table, there are two new improvements to the straight table chart in the Qlik Sense April 2020 release.

The first improvement is being able to search by label when using URLs within a table. Previously, you could change the representation of a URL to display the field (such as the Sales Order ID), but when trying to filter by these values, they would appear as URLs.

Now it is possible to choose whether to show the actual field value (the raw link), or the label.

KPI IMPROVEMENTS

There are new layout behaviours for KPI charts included within the April 2020 release. These help standardise font and measure sizes across multiple KPIs.

• Fixed – This is a new addition, where the front will always be the same size, regardless of changes across number formatting or the size of the KPI chart
• Fluid – This is also a new addition, where the font size depends on the size of the KPI. Make sure KPIs are the same size to ensure the same font size is used
• Responsive – This is the default behaviour in older versions of Qlik Sense, where the font size depends on both the box size, and the length of the text

CHART IMPROVEMENTS

A selection of smaller chart improvements have also been rolled into the Qlik Sense April 2020 release. These include:

• Number formatting of any “colour by” and “size by” measures in the map chart
• Limit of items on point and area layers increased to 50,000
• Exclude the Qlik logo on the map chart
• Hide basic rows in custom tooltip, if disabled measures on the chart will be included in the tooltip, as well as any measures added against the tooltip. Enabling “hide basic rows” will remove the measures added to the chart, and only display measures added against the tooltip.

Dynamic Views are now also present in Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (Previously only available in cloud versions of Qlik Sense).

Dynamic views allow users to query and view subsets of big data sets in charts that can be dynamically refreshed as the user interacts with the app. This enables visualisations to stay up-to-date within fast-changing datasets, or datasets with large volumes.

To use dynamic views, you need to connect a base app to another app. Master visualisations from the app can then be used within the base app. This allows developers to use master visualisations from the template app as dynamic charts across multiple applications. There is no limit of dynamic views that can be added to a base application.