What is Qlikview?

In short it’s an application that is capable of reporting and projecting information in a manner that can be deemed meaningful and appealing.

The major benefits of Qlikview are:

• Ability to compile data from multiple databases (SQL, Oracle, excel) and combine it in to a single logical view
• Drilling down to detail level information has never been easier. Qlikview’s ability to create associations with the data fields in the databases is quite an amazing feature which is helpful more often than not.
• Graphical representation along with tabular information helps you to customize the information the way you want to.

Qlikview is a very powerful reporting tool. With all its customization features the ability to create effective reports is a lot easier.

How does it work?

Like any development environment, Qlikview also has its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for developers to work with. You can download a personal edition free of charge and develop any application as there are no restrictions in terms of the features provided. However, any application you develop using a personal edition will only work with that specific machine the report was developed.

To work with Qlikview, you need to first select the data source. This can be a connection to a database or a simple excel or CSV file. For ease of explanation, I'll select a sample data source which is bundled with Qlikview installation.

We then need to reload the document. Reloading is similar to execute or run command you would find in a typical IDE. At this point, Qlikview will fetch the data from the data source and create a repository within so that you no longer will be working off the data source but only the cached copy.

Can anyone do Qlikview?

Yes! But you would be able to make more progress if you have knowledge of SQL as you need to extract the required data from the data sources. You can find plenty of resources to start your way to building applications.