Foreword
I will start with a confession: there is a past version of me that would have questioned the very publishing of a tome devoted to creating dashboards (much less to creating stunning dashboards). Why would we need an entire book on something as trivial as "formatting"? This is the easy stuff… right?
Indeed, I thought of myself as a serious data guy (and a semiserious coder). I had no time for such trivialities as RGB minutiae, pixel-perfect layout, and style sheets; and admittedly, my deliverables looked lousy! I probably violated every design principle in "the book" and perhaps even invented a few new ones.
In retrospect I realize this, but at the time, I was all about the numbers and a beautiful, symmetric data model. That's what pure design meant to me! Alas, as gorgeous as a perfect entity-relationship diagram or dimensional model is, the reality is that no one in your business will care. Certainly no one in my business cared.
Julián Villafuerte's Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView brings the dashboard UI to the front and center, where it really belongs. I'm sure many hardcore developers would argue with me on this (and certainly my past self would!) but the display of information and the telling of the story is as important as the numbers. Julian tacitly acknowledges this fact and provides us with a wonderful guide to realize this goal.
His writing flows seamlessly from pragmatic to theoretical, from perfunctory to humorous. He pays homage and proper attribution to the likes of Few, Tufte, and Rosling in the early chapters but quickly takes us on his own adventure. The myriad of images, code snippets, tables, and step-by-step instructions make the content easy to follow and straightforward to implement.
In addition to his writing style, Julian's visual design style also emerges in the book. Although very clean and minimalistic, it never comes across as cold or stark; rather, it comes across as warm and inviting. He's able to remove the "noise" while still presenting dashboards that you want to look at. He uses splashes of color and saturation to great effect and even an assortment of special icons. If other authors have led you to believe that such glitzy visual devices were verboten, I urge you to think again after you've had a chance to look at how effective they are in Julian's work throughout his book.
Be it a QlikView newbie or seasoned developer, there is something for everyone in Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView. It will help you get more eyes on your dashboards and better tell the stories within your data. And for those of you who are "all about the numbers", I would humbly suggest that this is a must-read.
Enjoy.
Bill Lay
Founder and Principal, William Lay Group
Los Angeles, 2015
