Filtering QlikView data

- QlikView lets you summarize large data sets. But there will be plenty of times when you want to deal with a subset of your data. One common example is looking at sales for a specific state or month. In this movie, I will show you how to limit the data summarized in your QlikView reports by creating filters. As a sample file, I will use the Filter report, and you can find that in the chapter four folder of your exercise files collection. You can define filters by using listboxes, multiboxes, and other controls.

I'll concentrate on listboxes and multiboxes because those are the two items that are most frequently used. The listbox I have here on the left shows each of the individual months. If you want to display results for only one of those months, then you can click it from the list. Just as an example, I'll click May, and my chart updated so that it only displays data for the month of May. I went from 300,000 in sales in California to just over 50,000. If you want to select multiple items, there are a few ways to do that.

The first is to drag and select. For example, if I want to show sales for February, March and April, I would click February, and, holding down the left mouse button, drag until my selection covered both March and April, as well. If you want to select individual items that aren't next to each other, you can control click. If I wanted to display the results for January, I would click there, then hold down the control key, and click another month, such as June.

You can see the split between the two values there. If you want to remove an item from a filter, then all you need to do is hold down the control key and click it. If I want to focus on January, I would hold down the control key, click June, and June goes away. If you want to remove a filter entirely from a control, then right-click its title bar at the top, and click Clear. Doing so removes your filter and displays summaries based on all of your data. Filtering using a multibox is similar.

Let's say that you want to show the results for Arizona and California. To do that, you could click the State controls down arrow, and then, holding down the control key before you click the first item, click Arizona and California. As soon as you release the control key, those two states appear and your filter is applied. You can see in the multibox that there is a green circle indicating that a multi-item filter has been applied. If I only wanted to see results for orders on Saturday, then I can click the Weekdays control down arrow, and click Saturday.

Doing that displays the actual filter value inside of the control. There's room for one here. That is Saturday, the day I selected. There was only room for one for State, but I have two, so I get a green circle or green dot, indicating that a multi-item filter has been applied. If I want to remove a filter from a specific control or specific field within the multibox, I just right-click its field name, so I might right-click Weekday, and click Clear.

If I want to clear all selections, I could right-click any of the field headers and click Clear All Selections. Doing so gets rid of the filter entirely. Filtering is one of the most powerful things you can do inside of QlikView. You can focus on the data that you need to make your decisions and then restore your report so that all of your data's summarized.