TrueChart Extension Review

By this, a common understanding and displaying language can be achieved for QlikView and Qlik Sense applications within the organization. The unified given structures and rules make it convenient to concentrate on the data quality and information/message to be told rather than on the displaying aspects. The centrally controlled dynamic commenting function wraps the whole extension. 

I will describe to overall functionalities of the tool rather going into the technical tutorials or tips. For me, I found these features to be determinant:
 

• Same scaling for all values types within one sheet: When you define the measures, you can define the scaling group (curreny, percent, etc.), which will than displayed for all graphs in the same page in the same size. This makes comparing very helpful
• Having predefined colors for actual, previous year, budget and forecast makes measures easily understandable without using legends for each graphics
• Dynamic commenting: Once I have defined the commenting key (based on period and region for example), having messages and comments dynamically adds a whole new level to the application
• Comparisons in charts of two dimensions
• The graphics look very professional, so this makes it easier for the designer/developer to build comprehensible and expressive visualizations

TrueChart comes with two types of diagrams, table and bar chart, however, the bar chart includes displaying options such as bar, line, waterfall, needle, symbol, multiple (grid chart) and value. Other object types are grid (for creating layout), text (title, subtitle and comment), empty (empty box) and button. So, whereas QlikView provides much more diagram types, I found it very useful to have less, but predefined diagram types. The commenting feature can also be used for dynamic title and subtitles, which makes it great to provide overall periodic messages.

In QlikView, the mini diagrams within a table diagram are very useful. With TrueChart this looks similar. The additional dynamic commenting function however, gives the application a powerful feature for collaboration between each users of the application. As there is also Collaboration in QlikView for shared notes or bookmarks, having it dynamically based on the dimensions I defined, makes it great to store data historically (e.g. commenting based on year and month). The comments can be stored within a database, which is required for the installation.

After defining the context of the measures (whether they are actual, budget, forecast, previous year or delta), it was great to see already the data shown within the appropriate coloring for each measure.

Having worked a little bit with this extension in QlikView, in my opinion, this extension is one the best extensions I have seen so far. Whereas TrueChart works only in Ajax mode (therefore over the Internet browser), TrueChart for Qlik Sense is much more better integrated, as I have seen so far. However, besides the displaying styles, the commenting feature is the absolute convincing feature, which will be very useful within financial applications. There are a lot of options and features such as comparison, numbering of the comments and assigning them to dimensions, highlighting and exporting. For further information, there is a demo application: 

• URL: http://demo.highcoordination.de/qlikview
• ID: HICO\HiCoConsumer
• PW: HCD123$