QlikView Your Business. Troyansky Oleg

a single sheet called Main. Developers can rename the Main sheet and add more sheets as needed for the application. There is no technical limitation to the number of sheets, but it’s advised to keep the number of sheets manageable, to avoid unnecessary clutter.

Creating a new sheet is simple. You can use Layout ⇒ Add Sheet or simply click on the first icon on the Design toolbar. Both options are shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2: Adding new sheets

      When multiple sheets exist, they can be moved up or down the list using the Promote Sheet and Demote Sheet options (either in the Layout menu or with the toolbar icons).

      New sheets are created with a full set of default properties, inherited from the Document Properties. The properties can be accessed and modified as needed, by right-clicking on the sheet (any empty space on the screen) and selecting Properties from the context menu. For example, the Title of the sheet is the first attribute that you need to change, unless you like using default titles Sheet1, Sheet2, and so on. As an alternative, you can access the Sheet Properties by using the toolbar icon Sheet Properties, located in the Design toolbar, next to the Promote and Demotebuttons.

      Fortunately, not too many Sheet Properties need to be adjusted. For the most part, it’s recommended to accept the document defaults, in order to keep the look and feel of the sheets consistent. For this reason, we are going to cancel our scheduled 45-minute tour around the detailed list of all Sheet Properties. You will instead discover each setting as it comes up.

      About Tabs and Tabrow

      Sheet titles appear on the tabs on top of the screen. The area that hosts all the tabs is called the tabrow. When you right-click on the tab of an active sheet, you get a choice of either Tabrow Properties or Sheet Properties. You usually need to access Sheet Properties. You may notice that Sheet Properties are not available when you right-click on the tab of an inactive sheet, hence you need to activate the sheet before you can access its properties.

      Exercise 4.2: Creating and Renaming New Sheets

      1. Add a new sheet by clicking on the Add Sheet toolbar icon in the Design toolbar or by selecting the Layout⇒Add Sheet menu option.

2. Now you should have two sheets – Main and Sheet1. Rename the two sheets to Template and Sales. In order to rename a sheet, do the following (see Figure 4-3):

Figure 4-3: Accessing sheet properties

      a. Click on the sheet label to activate it (1).

      b. Right-click anywhere on the empty space (2)

      c. Select Properties from the context menu (3).

      d. Find the Title field on top of the General tab and replace the default title with the new one (4).

      Working with Colors in QlikView

      Every pixel on a QlikView sheet is painted in a certain color, and each one of those colors is configurable through dozens of properties – text colors, line colors, background colors, and so on. This section describes the process of defining a color in QlikView, and you will use the same process every time you need to define another color.

All the colors in QlikView are defined in a similar way. Let’s examine Figure 4-4, which describes the process of defining a default background color for the document.

Figure 4-4: Defining a color in QlikView

      The Background Color setting appears as a button with the same color that it describes (A). Once you click on the button, QlikView opens the Color Area window.

      Each color area can be defined with a solid color or two types of gradient colors (B). The base color is presented with a similar button (C). Clicking on this button leads to the Color window, which allows picking the color itself.

      The color can be picked from 48 basic colors or from a continuous palette on the right, or it can be entered manually as a combination of HSL numbers or RGB numbers. Most organizations are very particular about their branding colors, and it’s good to identify those and use them in your layouts. To help with this process, QlikView offers a selection of up to 16 custom colors that can be saved for easy retrieval in the future.

      As an alternative to selecting the color manually, the color can be also defined as calculated (Figure 4-4, E). You will learn more about calculated colors in Chapters 8 and 12. In the following exercise, you define the default Background Color and the Tab Text Color.

      Exercise 4.3: Defining Colors

      1. Open Settings⇒Document Properties, then click the General tab and locate Background Color.

      2. Experiment with the Background Color settings. Set the background to the Two Color Gradient, using your high school’s colors as a base.

      3. Once you’ve had enough fun, scratch it off and replace the background color with a solid color of pure white.4. Open Sheet Properties, select the General tab, and locate the setting for the Tab Text Color. Set the color to RGB(0,100,200). Throughout the book, we will be using this format for red-green-blue color definitions. It corresponds to red: 0, green: 100, and blue: 200. The RGB numbers can be entered in the lower-right corner of the Color dialog

      3.

      At this time, the sheets are ready to be filled with sheet objects. Let’s begin filling them up, starting from simple objects and continuing on to charts and gauges.

      List Boxes, Text Objects, and Other Sheet Objects

      Charts carry most of the weight in QlikView, but let’s first talk about simpler objects that create the proper environment for charts – list boxes that allow users to make selections; text objects that carry texts, images, and backgrounds; and a few other object types that are commonly used in most QlikView applications.

In this section, you will build the template that will be used throughout this application. The end result is presented in Figure 4-5. In the process, you will learn about the following QlikView objects:

      ● List boxes and multi boxes

      ● Table boxes

      ● Text objects

      ● Line/arrow objects

      ● Current selections box and search object

      If you are familiar with the basics of QlikView visualizations, feel free to test your knowledge by building the template on your own. You may refer to the exercises in this section to get specific settings such as colors, positions, and sizes of various objects. Then, feel free to skip to the next section, called “Developing Simple Charts in QlikView.”

Figure 4-5: The end in mind – the finished Template sheet

      Introducing List Boxes and Multi Boxes

      List boxes and multi boxes serve a similar purpose in QlikView. They allow you to make selections and show selected, associated, and excluded values.

      List Box: The Cornerstone of QlikView

      List boxes present lists of field values and offer the ability to select certain items of interest. When certain data items are selected, their background turns green. Items that are associated with the selected values appear with the white background, and other items that are not associated are grayed out. The green-white-gray color scheme is one of the fundamentals