QlikView is an easy-to-use business intelligence product. It is designed to facilitate ad hoc relationship analysis but can also be used for more formal corporate performance applications for the financial user. It is designed to use a methodology of direct discovery to analyze data from multiple sources. QlikView is designed to allow you to do your own business discovery and to take you quickly out of the data management stage and into the data relationship investigation stage. Investigating relationships and outliers in financial data more quickly can lead to better management.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- When do we use QlikView?
- Getting ready—downloading and installing QlikView
- Becoming familiar with QlikView
- Opening and examining QlikView
- Loading data from Excel
- How QlikView works for analysis—finding the out of balance
- Modifying the load script
- Loading more than one spreadsheet
- Automatically linking data
With that in mind, when would you want to use QlikView? You would use it when you wish to analyze and quickly see trends and exceptions that—with normal financial application-oriented BI products—would not be readily apparent without days of setting up by consultants and technology departments. With QlikView, you can also analyze data relationships that are not measured in monetary units. Certainly, QlikView can be used to analyze sales trends and stock performance, but other relationships soon become apparent when using QlikView.
This chapter will take you through getting financial ledger data into QlikView and analyzing the out of balance.