When you have loaded the data, Qlik Sense will usually create the sheet for you, and take you there. So, if you see a big blank area with the text The sheet is empty, you can skip to the next section:

But if you are still in the Load editor, you may need to perform the following steps to create a sheet:

At this stage, you are probably looking at an empty sheet with the text The sheet is empty located in the middle.

Click on the Edit button to the right in the toolbar to start adding things. Doing so will open the Assets panel to the left listing a number of object types: Bar chart, Combo chart, Filter pane, and so on. Now, you can drag and drop an object type onto your sheet, thereby creating such an object. If you, for instance, drag a bar chart onto the sheet, you will create an empty bar chart:

Depending on where you drop it, it will use all of the sheet or just half the sheet. Move the object around before you drop it, and you'll see. You can also adjust its size at a later stage.

Once you have dropped it, the bar chart will clearly show that it needs a dimension and a measure in order to display properly. You can click on the buttons on the bar chart to define these, but you can also use the Assets panel on the left.

The Assets panel shows object types, but if you look carefully, you will see that there are three tabs at its top—one for object types, one for fields, and one for the predefined library entities. So, if you click on the middle icon, you will see a list of fields that can be used as dimensions or as measures:

The Assets panel now shows a list of fields

You can now drag and drop fields onto the bar chart, thereby creating the dimension and the measure.

A dimension is a field with discrete values, for example, customer, product, or month. A chart will create one number per dimensional value; hence, a bar chart will create one bar per distinct value in the chosen field.

A measure is usually a number, for example, sum of sales or number of orders, and this will constitute the height of the bars.

When you drag a field onto the empty bar chart, Qlik Sense will ask you what you want to do with this field. You can add it (as a dimension), or you can use it inside an aggregation function (Sum(), Count(), or Min()) to form a measure:

Adding measures

When you have added both dimension and measure, the bar chart will appear as shown in the next screenshot. To the right, you will have the properties of the bar chart, where you can set its properties—the sort order, the colors, and so on. You can also define the dimension and the measure directly in the chart properties:

To see the final result, you need to click on Done in the toolbar, which takes you back to fullscreen.

Clicking on the Save button in Qlik Sense Desktop will save the application as a file with the extension .qvf in the application folder (C:Users<user>DocumentsQlikSenseApps). The file contains both data and script and it can be imported to other Qlik Sense installations. However, you may need to adjust the script so that it runs from the new location.

When you are done with the bar chart, you should click on Save and start creating your next visualization.

In the Server version of Qlik Sense, you don't have a Save button. The changes are saved automatically.

An exciting feature in Qlik Sense is storytelling. Storytelling is basically a presentation mode, where you can first prepare a presentation—like a slide show—and then present it. Storytelling is also an excellent way to present an application and create an overview of its content.

When you create an application, you can—in addition to the normal application development of course—also create a story that can be used by anyone who uses the application. However, we believe that the more common use case is that stories will be created not by the application developer, but rather by contributors—power users who choose to add elements to the application. Hence, storytelling is described in Chapter 4, Contributing to Data Discovery.