These are a few of my favorite things…

As a self-confessed analytics geek and techy, what I loved the most about last week was seeing attendees push the boundaries of their skills sets with our platform, get hands on and creative with new functions and leave with valuable insights that they can use to inspire those back home.

This year, I had the honor of showcasing some of the new developments the Qlik platform has to offer. So, if you weren’t able to make it to my presentation, check out my five favorites below:

1. More customization

Behind the scenes at Qlik, we’ve been doing a huge amount of work over the past few releases to ensure that you can customize your apps the way you want them. This includes macro-level customizations, like themes, as well as fine-grain detail. It’s now easier than ever to change the themes on your dashboards to anything you like. In fact, not only can you personalize the colors across your apps, but you can now even change the fonts and styling – something particularly important if you need to build “on brand” dashboards! Customizing the fine-grain detail is more than just making it look great but also allows you to better understand the clustering of your data and track the dimensions between different charts. These richer, more tactile visualizations will help drive new insights, such as better understanding outliers – all while looking more visually appealing than ever before.

2. Insight Advisor

Qlik’s associative model has always been able to understand the data you input – but our new insight advisor comes with a cognitive engine which, when working together with the associative model, produces actionable insights. These new insights can easily be added to your sheets with a simple click of a button.

You can even give the insight advisor feedback in order to tailor your app – by inputting variables you’re interested in, it can then generate a new set of customized insights. Data visualizations that previously may have taken time to build will now appear automatically in one click as if by magic!Look for Insight Advisor in our June 2018 release.

3. Association recommendations

Association recommendations are now better and more sophisticated than ever. In visual data prep, the magic wand now opens up an information pane showing you exactly what associations are being recommended. You can preview associations between tables, or even preview all of them together, and get an understanding of what association recommendations are being suggested. I love having a full understanding of my data model before it is built. Without the right data model, your analysis is meaningless.

4. Augmented self-service

Augmented self-service with chart recommendations is different from the Insight Advisor, as often, users will know what fields they want to look at, and what they want to build out. Instead, as you drag these fields onto the screen, Qlik automatically understands what type of field it is. For example, if you drag on a measure, the values will be summed and displayed in as a KPI. If you then add a dimension, the visualization will automatically change to a recommended optimal chart based on the fields added and the data within the fields. You can even give feedback to the system on how you want something else. This makes creating visualizations faster and more intuitive than ever before, freeing up more time to play around with and truly understand all your data.

5. Multi-layer maps

Building out map-based visualizations is now even easier – all it takes is a quick drag and drop! Users can load in different variables, which can be represented through different sizes or colors. The maps are easily customizable – you’re able to simply change different settings, such as the projection of the earth, to whatever suits your needs and preferences. You’re also able to add in different layers for more complex data visualizations. Within seconds, you’ll be able to construct a beautiful looking map to help provide important insights into your data.

If you’d like to learn more about these fantastic new features and see them brought to life, I’ve included a video of my full Qonnections presentation below.

I hope you all enjoying playing around with these great new aspects of Qlik Sense as much as I did. They have all been added to help you work smarter, faster and more flexibly than ever before – please do let me know in the comments which ones you are enjoying the most!