Bill Lay showed this one in his Tips & Tricks session at the “Masters Summit for QlikView” in San Francisco.

How do you show a currency symbol on chart y-axis values?  It requires two steps:

1. Assign the format, like Money, in the Number format.

2. Here’s the trick — set a value for the axis “Static Step”. 

The resulting chart will include the “$” on each value of the axis.

There is an odd bit about this behavior. If the chart is not tall enough to show the Static Step increment, QV will revert to not showing the “$”. I’ll reduce the height of this chart to demonstrate.

You can display units other than currencies,  for example meters. Use the text in the Number format like “#,##0 meters”.

One more odd bit to be aware of. Remember I said the text part will not display if the chart is too short? An exception is made if the chart is tall enough for every line on the axis to have a value. If every line is filled, the text is shown, regardless of the increment used.

Let me demonstrate with the Length chart. I’ll set the Static Step property to “1”.  As expected, the “meters” text will not display because the chart is not tall enough to show increments of 1 meter.

Now watch what happens when I increase the height of the chart:

As soon as every line of the y-axis contains a label, “meters” appears, even though the increment is still much larger than 1.

Join us at a future Masters Summit for more tips from Dr Bill. I will be presenting along with the rest of the Masters crew in New York City in September and Copenhagen in October. See you there!

-Rob