2020 has been a big year for the world, so you can be excused if you missed out on what is new and hot in Qlik Sense! As always Qlik are bringing out new features, functionality, and bug fixes. In this blog I will try and summarise the new features for this year’s releases, for details on bug fixes refer to Qlik Support portal!
February 2020:
The February 2020 release was quite a major one, there were some quite significant improvements on the Augmented Intelligence that are worth checking out.
As always, several enhancements were made with in the visualization space to not only make things easier to develop but also provide a better overall end user experience.
I think this release addresses a lot of the common requests around wanting to stylize Applications inline with organisation branding and themes.
Augmented Intelligence
The release had a big focus on Qlik’s Augmented Intelligence capabilities or the Qlik cognitive engine. The capabilities around visual insight generation has moved forward a step, which is great as I previously I had thought some of the generated visualizations used questionable metrics which did not always reconcile with the business. Of course, the augmented intelligence functionality includes Qlik’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) pattern recognition, so you can type your questions and filter through dimensions on measures.
It’s important to note that NLP support needs to be enabled for existing installations, which requires the deployment of SSL certificates (this is required for each node in a multi node environment).
Radar charts are also now available in Insights.
Creating visualizations from your data using Insights
Visualisations and Dashboards
This release brings many more advanced and customized analytic options to users, all of which are based on customer feedback, great hey!
This release features new statistical capabilities to easily add a trend line to both the bar and the line chart. Trend line options include average, linear, exponential, logarithmic, power and polynomial of second, third, and fourth degree.
Table trend indicators
The straight table has been enhanced with graphical elements. The user can add conditional icons like the KPI object. Table indicators are useful for presenting trends and warning information and highlighting essential information.
Moving average and difference
Two new modifiers are added to the bar chart, line chart, table, and combo chart. The new modifiers support full moving average and difference in steps, for instance rolling 12 months average. The modifier concept provides a quick and easy way to add another level to any expression. The generated expressions are available for inspection copy and edit.
Custom map point symbols
In addition to standard shapes the user can now any add image in the point layer of the Map chart. The point layer also supports the rotation of images. Having images as map symbols is highly requested by customers, typical use cases are separating types of assets or using logos on the map.
Funnel chart enhancements
A new custom sort option is now available in Funnel charts, in addition to the default descending measure. This highly requested feature is valuable when a user wants to model a less strict funnel.
Improved action button
We have improved our action button with more styling options, including background colour and image, label font size and colour and border colour, width, and radius. This really let’s you stylize Apps according you your organisation.
Custom tooltips
Custom tooltips are available for the bar chart, combo chart, map chart, pie chart, scatter plot, and the tree map. You can tailor the tooltip by adding any measure. The measure can be number formatted. This was highly requested by our customers.
Map layer selection toggle
The content creator can now decide which layers should be selectable or not. This is convenient for layers holding background information.
Condition background layers
Map background layers can be switched on or off using a Show conditions option.
Duplicate dimensions and measures
You can now create a master dimension based on a dimension created in a visualization. This really speeds up development time!
Reusing dimensions with master dimensions
Themes
For a long time there have been many requests around customisation of themes, it is great that Qlik have listened to the community, personally I hear from customers frequently around theme wish lists!
Pivot table styling
Styling includes header font size and colour, cell font size and colour, text alignment and colour of dimension values. Styling improves readability and gives users the power to create and customize the look and feel of Qlik Sense tables.
Line chart styling
The line chart has been improved with several new styling options. The lines can be individually styled per measure or for the whole chart.
- Line thickness
- Line style: solid or dashed
- Line curve: smooth or straight
- Vertical presentation
Extended font family selection
The new theme setting allows developers to set the font family for text in Qlik Sense charts. The ability to style apps with custom fonts has been requested by many customers.
Sense for Developers: Creating themes with custom fonts
April 2020:
The April 2020 release focuses on many new visualization features and styling options to Qlik Sense, letting you create more advanced and customized analytics. The organization chart is now part of the visualization bundle (for all those using the extension previously this makes maintenance one step simpler), and you can now add a relative modifier to bar charts, combo charts, line charts, and tables. In addition, Other improvements to tables, pivot tables, KPIs, maps, and custom tooltips, and app navigation are also baked in.
Visualizations and dashboards
Organization chart
As mentioned, the visualization bundle now carries the organization chart. The org chart lets you create organization charts from data with a tree structure. You can navigate through the hierarchy by expanding and collapsing the tree.
Search in tables
In addition to the standard search by a URL link, you can now search by a link label in a table. There is also the option to disengage native scroll on touch to enable first column freeze.
Pivot table improvements
There are two improvements to pivot tables:
- You can now save your pivot table layout state. This lets you store expanded or collapsed nodes as a bookmark. This improvement is ideal for sharing views of large pivot tables with many nodes.
Creating a bookmark with an expanded pivot table
- You can now sort by first measure. This sorting method precedes all other sorting. This lets you sort categories differently, for example, sorting category by sales rather than by name.
Map chart improvements
Map layer properties. Now, you have number formatting options in the map chart for colour and size by measure. We have increased the limit of items on point and area map layers to 50,000.
Relative modifier (percentages)
The relative modifier provides you with a quick way to display the relative percentage of a measure, without having to write expression syntax. You can use it to see the impact of specific selections, relative to the selection, relative to the total, or relative to other fields. This is available as a setting is available in bar charts, combo charts, line charts, and tables.
Tooltip customization
You can now choose to exclude default measures in tooltips. You can also hide all or part of the tooltips from a visualization.
Sheet trigger
This feature lets you add actions that are triggered when a user opens a sheet. With this feature, you can enable more sophisticated navigation functionality. Actions include setting selections, field states, bookmarks, and variables.
Global Navigation
Global navigation provides you with a new approach to top-level navigation through drop-down lists in the Qlik Sense client.
Themes
KPI font layout
You have new options when choosing the layout behaviour for fonts in KPIs. You can choose a fixed layout (same text size always), fluid layout (text size depends on box size), or responsive layout (adapts to the size of the box and the length of text).
June 2020:
The June 2020 follows the April 2020 release in visualization enhancements, building on existing capabilities. Probably the coolest thing in this release is custom tool tips. Once again building on the whole customisation of Qlik Sense to fit your organization.
Visualizations and dashboards
Sparkline chart
In a straight table, you can now add a mini chart to a table cell. This mini chart, called a Sparkline chart, is a small line chart that lets you measure across a second dimension.
New bullet chart
The new bullet chart is a custom-built gauge for displaying KPIs. The new bullet chart has extended customization and improved functionality. The new bullet chart replaces the bullet chart that was previously included as part of the visualization bundle.
Table customization
When using either the straight table or the pivot table, you can now set the size of the scrollbar, and you can highlight rows on hover.
Org chart enhancements
It is now easier to interact with Org charts with improvements such as a home button, border colour options, and automatic resizing.
Filter pane enhancements
When using a filter pane, text can now be aligned left, right, or centre, and users can copy values to their local clipboard.
Number formatting
You can now customize the colour range when using colour by measure or colour by expression when using bar, line, and pie charts.
Custom Tooltip enhancements
Improved custom tooltip options:
- Tooltip support for line charts
- More information in tooltips for all charts
- Dynamic titles with expressions
- Support for expression modifiers: ALL and TOTAL
- Option to hide default rows
Hopefully this is of interest or helpful for somebody.
Thomas – MacGyver of code.
Thomas blogs about big data, reporting platforms, data warehousing and the systems behind them. Read some of his other blogs here.
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