The Order Details dashboard opens and responds quickly when we click on the items in the large, straight table in the sheet. The display does this because the data is not dependent upon calculations, but is preloaded detail data that is just summed up. This is one of the great advantages of QlikView as an analysis medium: its ability to quickly load, sum up, and display large amounts of data in a concise fashion.
The rest of the display on the sheet consists of the Multi Box, which is used to select members from the various groups within the linked straight table, and the two small summary straight tables on the left-hand side of the sheet. The Multi Box, as usual, hides the Country, but we already know that there are only Australia and New Zealand as choices anyway.
One of the things that we immediately notice is that there seems to be a lot of negative revenue highlighted in red. If we pick Watcom International, one of the customers associated with the red Sales numbers, and we spread out the Order Date column, we can see some strange-looking dates. The load has the Order Date in the day/month/year order. A strange choice, but it does sort in the date order when we select a month in the filters. When we don't have a month selected in the filter, the data sorts alphabetically, by customer. There is no format code to switch the display to a more familiar way. However, to make this more user friendly, we can make sure that our dates are in a sort format such as century/year/ month/day when we load our data. Otherwise, we will have to hunt for usable date ranges. If the date was displayed as 2009/05/06, we would know that 6/05/2009 is May 6, 2009. It is only when we get to displays such as 28/05/2009 that we are able to figure out that the Order Date is actually May 28, 2009. This also eliminates the country/language differences in the date display/interpretation.
If we clear our selections and choose Wholesale Grocery in our Segment group, 2011 as the Year, Jenny Davidson under Sales Manager, and Pannega as our Customer, both the Sales Person and the Segment Desc are automatically selected for us. We can see that Pannega is in the Convenience Store Segment and the Sales Rep is Kim Williams. If we clear out the selections again, select just the Sales Rep as Kim Williams, and then limit the year to 2011 again, we can see that Kim Williams is the only Sales Rep for Pannega. We can also see that Pannega, with a negative revenue of -$2,616.57, was not doing well at all in 2011. Additionally, there were no liquor sales to offset this return loss on the grocery items.
Switching to 2010, we can see over seventy thousand in positive sales to Pannega. Moreover, since only Kim Williams sells to Pannega, some of the implications that we might consider are as follows:
- Has Pannega found other sources for the products that we supply?
- Was Pannega going out of business in 2011?
- Where do we reassign Kim Williams if we are keeping that sales representative?
Figure 8-1: Order Details for Kim Williams in 2011
To the left in the preceding screenshot, we can see a quick summary of details such as the number of Orders, number of Line Items, Volume, Revenue, and Margin summarized and matching the totals at the bottom in the large straight table to the right.
To get an idea about the other options for displaying the same types of data, a demonstration titled Order and Inventory Management is available on the QlikView website, at the following URL:
You can also go to the QlikView website and search for Order and Inventory Management. Open the demonstration in your web browser when you find it. The first sheet with the Dashboard tab is more colorful and more meaningful than the On Time Delivery line graph that we investigated in the lower-right quadrant of the Inventory tab in the previous chapter. The information in the labels is more informative as well.
You may examine the Inventory Detail and the What If? tabs in this QlikView document to see if you prefer the layout choices made by the designer; but we will be reviewing the Order Details tab here to compare it with the one in the CFO dashboard.
Figure 8-2: Order Details tab in Order and Inventory Management in the online demonstration
Although this dashboard is not as colorful, the absence of red may or may not be a good thing. That is because, although we are not displaying a lot of negative sales, there are some, and they don't stand out for those of us who are not red-green color blind. The red number display for the negative numbers definitely stands apart from the accounting (parentheses) used in the online demonstration.
Notice too that the date display choice in this example is more human-friendly. By hovering the mouse indicator on the right edge until we get the double-ended arrow symbol, we can pull on the right-hand side of the display. We can pull the straight table wide enough so that we can see all the data. Moreover, we do not have to use the scroll bar at the bottom of the numbers columns. It is also useful to have the Quantity Open and Quantity Shipped columns. I also prefer the clearly-labelled Current Selections box in the upper-left corner of the display.
Although we cannot look at the Properties of this Order Details table on the web, we can right-click and switch back and forth from a straight table to a Pivot Table.
Figure 8-3: Web-based Fast Change selection
In the next section, we will learn how to change the Order Details tab in our CFO dashboard to allow switching between the display types, how to color-code our data and format our numbers, how to Export a Pivot Table to Excel for further analysis, and how to use dynamic expressions.