I like my apps to work like dog toys. When I poke them, they should “squeak”. I find myself poking at screens with my mouse or finger wondering “What’s this?”.
When I build a QlikView app I try to make it “touchy”. That is, if a curious user pokes at something on the screen I provide more information about that object in the form of a popup/tooltip. For example, explain the meaning of a conditional warning icon:
In this post I’ll look at some options available in QlikView to provide touchy feedback to users of your app. A qvw example to accompany this post is available for download here.
The Help Text property is available on every object Caption pane. The value can be fixed text or an expression.
When Help Text is present in a chart, the ? icon will appear in the chart caption. Touching the ? will display the Help Text in a tooltip.
Object Help Text is a good place to document the details of the chart and highlight anything special about this chart. Try to anticipate questions like “does this include…” or “where does the x number come from..” and provide those answers in advance.
You can provide as much text as necessary and use newlines and indentation for formatting. You cannot change the font face or color.
When Help Text is used in a Text Object or a Button, a caption is not required. If caption is off for those objects the tooltip will appear when hovering anywhere in the object. This is useful as seen in the icon example at the beginning of this post.
The Chart Dimension or Expression “Comment” property can provide a tooltip for individual columns in a text chart. For Dimensions, any data model comment for that field will be used if the Dimension Comment is empty.
Using multiline Dimensions or Expressions in a text table provides cell level popups:
(More about cell popups here)
Scatter charts can provide focus to points of interest. As a user I typically want to know more about specific points. Using additional expressions with ‘Text as Popup” can provide rich detail, even new aggregations using different dimensions.
Check out the downloadable example “Make it Touchy” for more tips including using transparent text objects to create tooltips anywhere.
-Rob
Great stuff! Lot’s of options for creativity here.
I’ve moved away from this type of thing in recent years, as devices have heavily shifted to mobile, where obviously you can’t mouse over anything. I’m favoring annotations over tooltips these days.
What about QlikSense
I plan a future post to address the details of similar opportunities in Qlik Sense,
Really impatient to learn these workarounds, because help text is a big lack in Sense.
I have already a heavy QVW. Help texts will indeed improve understanding of the objects. However, will they also not blowup your QVW?
Thank your sharing this insight.
It will increase the size of your QVW, but I expect the increase will be small relative to your data.
Thanks again for taking the time to produce a concise qvw covering features I had forgotten about and effective ways to use them.
It is also a nice reminder to always think of the user and not get too caught up in the code or technology