Qlik has implemented a new “Simplified Authoring” experience in the SaaS (Cloud) environment. It’s available as an optional preview now and will be implemented for all SaaS tenants in mid-August.

I won’t describe the new features as they are well described here. If you haven’t already, I recommend you read the post and then come back here for my comments.

I think this is really great work and a significant improvement to the chart authoring experience. It not only makes it easier for newbies to create charts, I prefer using this interface in most cases. What do I like about it?

Moving the data panel to the left and increasing the display density is much more productive and fluid. This change seems to signal the death of the “iPad first” design. I’m pretty happy about that. The ability to work with field values while in design mode is fantastic.

The addition of the Data Table is brilliant. It’s much more fluid than swapping tabs to use the Data Model Viewer or building a temp table on the canvas.

I didn’t think I would like the “smart grid” feature but I’ve become a fan. With additional elements like Data Table the working canvas becomes relatively smaller and I’ve found it simplest to just add my chart in the general location and move on. As a final step I can switch to advanced mode and fine tune the chart locations and sizes if necessary.

Very cool feature to me is the new Chart Filters. This filter is implemented as a set expression applied to the data before expression set analysis is applied. So you now have three layers of data filtering — User Selections, Chart Filter, Expression (Measure) set analysis.

The chart filter is requested by a set expression in hypercube property qHyperCubeDef.qContextSetExpression . So you can use it in the Engine API if the engine level supports it. Potentially we could see Chart Filters available in a future QSEoW release. I think it would be useful to have Chart Filters as a master item for reusability and consistency.

If you are using QSDA Pro to evaluate your Qlik Sense apps (why not!), QSDA Pro release 2.1 supports capturing and parsing the new Chart Filters.

Want to up your Qlik Development game? Register for the Masters Summit for Qlik — Madrid 19 Sept or New Orleans 14 Nov — three days of advanced Qlik Developer training and tips.

-Rob