From a developer perspective, Qlik Sense is an analytics tool that lets you build ‘apps’ containing beautiful dashboards out of your raw data.
The out-of-the-box features in Qlik Sense include various visualisation types such as data tables, bar, line and pie charts, histograms and waterfall charts. There are charts for everything you might want to display. If you want something that isn’t available out of the box, plenty of Qlik Sense extensions are available for sale from respectable providers. You can also build your own, but you will need some knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript to get started building extensions. The dashboards are built inside ‘apps’. Apps are a way to organise data into relevant sections. For example, you may have an app that looks at customer acquisition and another that analyses customer purchases.
Qlik Sense doesn’t just allow you to hardcode what is shown to users though. From a user perspective, Qlik is highly interactable, meaning they can filter the data down to their specific requirement with just a few clicks of their mouse. Qlik Sense also supports variable use, which allows you to get very creative with what you’re doing in both the data load script and in the front end. For example, you can allow your users to pass a value to a variable, which would, in turn, update a chart!
In the backend, Qlik uses a simple scripting language very similar to SQL which you can use to transform your raw data. Connecting to various data sources is a breeze with out-of-the-box data connectors. You can use the ETL methodology to extract and transform your raw data to meet your requirements easily. You can also load data in by uploading a CSV/ Excel file if you prefer – no data connections are necessary to get started!
As a beginner developer, you don’t need to be able to code much to get started. Yes, the ‘Data load editor‘ does require you to write code to load the data but Qlik also has a ‘Data Manager’ feature which lets you add data by clicking on what you want and connect that data by dragging the relevant fields to each other. This method doesn’t allow for complex data transformations but it’s a great way to get started quickly if you haven’t coded much before.
Overall, Qlik Sense is a brilliant analytics tool that is intuitive for both users and developers. It has fantastic features and allows your users to drill down to the exact data they need. Here is an example of a script loading some Google Analytics data of a small website using the ‘Data Load Editor’:
There are too many features to explore in this introduction, so to dive deeper, explore the ‘core knowledge’.
