Preface

Implementing Qlik Sense is a book intended for readers who wish to do a great project implementation on Qlik Sense. This book will give readers all the information, right from strategy to requirement gathering to implementing BI solution using Qlik Sense. Various scenarios in the book will empower the readers to take right decisions in tricky and difficult situations while developing analytical dashboards.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Consultant – An Introduction: This chapter will give the readers an understanding about what is consultancy, how it differs from being a developer, and the importance of consultancy in making a project successful. The readers will learn about what they are supposed to do as consultants, the importance of their role in making a project successful, expectations that are there from a consultant, and the roles they need to play.

Chapter 2, Preparing for the Project: This chapter will give the readers an understanding about how to prepare for a project and the homework they need to do. The readers will learn about the initial homework they need to do, how to understand the customer better, and how to accordingly plan the strategy. The readers will also understand what is expected from a consultant and the roles they need to play being consultants.

Chapter 3, Prerequisites to start a Project: This chapter will enlist the various aspects needed to start a project. It will help to understand the various aspects along with their importance, and the tactics to handle them. The readers will learn about the important aspect of starting the project which is often missed and can lead to failure of project. They will also learn about scoping the project along with learning about documentation and its importance.

Chapter 4, Requirement Gathering: The focus of this chapter is to start the project execution with requirement gathering. Requirement gathering plays an important role in successful project execution. The take away for the readers from this chapter will be the tactics about requirement gathering and getting acquainted with the common mistakes which are done by most of the developers and project managers while executing this phase of a project.

Chapter 5, Architecture Design: This chapter is about architecture design where the focus will be to design infrastructure architecture and data architecture. This chapter will teach the readers about the importance of architecture design and the various aspects which will help to design architecture. The chapter will touch upon strategies to be used to ensure easy scaling and expansion.

Chapter 6, Development: This chapter talks about the actual execution of a project, where business requirement starts taking shape in form of dashboards and interactive analysis. The readers will learn the best practices of data modeling and visualization. They will also learn about handling tricky situations in this phase in an effective manner.

Chapter 7, Validation, UAT and Go Live: This chapter will focus on data validation and visualization validation. The chapter will help the readers understand how validation can be done quickly and how to ensure that the dashboard displays correct results. The readers will take away the skills to perform validation of the data as well as visualization. They will learn about the way to conduct the UAT with the business users and take the project to Go-live Stage.

Chapter 8, Post Go-Live: This chapter will teach the readers about the post Go-live activities which are required to make a project successful. It will talk about the adoption strategies, maintenance, auditing and documentation. The readers will learn about the importance of post Go-live activities and how they can make a difference to make project successful.

Chapter 9, Avoiding Common Pitfalls: This chapter will teach the readers about the most common mistakes and the steps to avoid them. They will learn about the importance of post Go-live activities and how they can make a difference to make a project successful.

Chapter 10, Knowledge Sets: This chapter will make the readers aware about some of the domain terminologies. It is important for any developer to have a basic understanding of domain. The readers will learn about the importance of various modules under each domain, which will help them to provide value added services to their customers, to improve customer satisfaction.

Chapter 11, A real life case-study: This chapter will make the readers understand how to apply the earlier learnt concepts in a real-life scenario. The names used in the chapter are not real but scenarios are real. The chapter will make the readers go through a real-life example to understand the challenges faced and the ways to handle them.

What you need for this book

The examples provided in the chapter will require you to have Qlik Sense Desktop installed on your PC. The Qlik Sense Desktop is a free software available for download from Qlik web site. The software runs on 64 bit Windows 7, 8.1, or 10 operating system. Recommended config is 4GB Ram or more with Intel i3 or higher processor.

The examples provided use Microsoft Access database. The user just needs Microsoft Access odbc driver to connect to the mdb file from Qlik Sense Desktop.

Who is this book for

This book contains guidelines for Qlik Sense developers who wish to become Qlik Sense consultants and ensure successful project implementations and drive greater adoption. The readers are advised to know the basics of Qlik Sense, starting from installation to basic configuration, like licensing the product, allocating roles to users, allocating the licenses to users, and so on.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and explanations of their meaning.

A block of code is set as follows:

REM Full Load from Excel file "Sales" ;

Sales:
LOAD
    Region,
    SalesID,
    Product,
    SalesAmt,
    LastModifiedDate
FROM [lib://Chapter 6/Sales.xlsx]
(ooxml, embedded labels, table is Sheet2);

REM Store the data into Qlik Data Mart i.e QVD;

Store Sales into [lib://Chapter 6/Sales.qvd];

Drop table Sales;

In-text code is highlighted in font and color as here: LOAD. The file and folder names are also shown in the same style, for example, Chapter6/Sales.xlsx.

At several places in the book, we have referred to external URLs to cite source of datasets or other information. A URL would appear in the following text style: http://finance.yahoo.com.

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: In order to download new modules, we will go to Files | Settings | Project Name | Project Interpreter.

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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