The New Reporting Tool!

Sep 26, 2016
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If you attended the Bowman conference in New Orleans last week, or if you know through other channels, we are going to become very interested in Qlik very soon! Aside from the AHAR, APRs, ending veteran and chronic homelessness, and all the other things us HMIS admins do every day, we can also start thinking about which of our custom ART reports we are going to definitely need to rewrite in Qlik!

Your first step will be to ask Bowman for a breakdown of all your reports and how many times which users have run them. Once you have that, look over it and come up with your top five most important reports. Rank them from least complex to the most complex with the idea that you start with the very important but simple reports first, then move on, increasing in importance and/or complexity as you get more familiar with Qlik. Hold onto that list!

In the meantime, you can do a few things to get ready for the transition.

  • Download QlikSense desktop, but only if you have Windows! If you're on a Mac or Linux or something else, you can go here to join Qlik Sense Cloud.
  • Whichever you decide to go with, pull down some text files to play with and try to recreate a simple report that you use. Whatever you create will NOT be able to be transferred to the new reporting tool once it's out with ServicePoint- just use these versions as ways to get a feel for Qlik.
  • Here are some good resources:
    • Qlik Sense training - links to multiple kinds of training, some free, some definitely not.
    • Qlik Community - free intro and training videos
    • Qlik blogs- Qlik Community, a collection of various blogs and discussion forums.
  • If you're a serious custom report developer, look up "set analysis" and read a bit about the syntax that Qlik uses. One good resource for this is the Set Analysis Wizard. If you are trying to get the hang of the syntax, it is good for playing around with the wysiwyg interface and watching the code change based on your answers. I have read, though, that you should not rely on it for all your code, as it is sometimes inaccurate. But for a basic understanding of how it all works, it could be helpful.
  • Come back here- as we move onto the new reporting tool, I will move back to blogging more about coding and report design!