First Impressions of using Qlik Sense cloud, using Survey of Business Owners data
There is certainly no shortage of various data visualization and BI tools on the market. On this blog we’ve already covered Tableau and Power BI , it’s time for us to review their competition, another leader on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI platforms: Qlik , which offers a suite of different BI tools. For the purposes of this post let’s focus on their web-based free product: Qlik Sense – Cloud. Most of the modern data viz programs are supposed to be rather intuitive and very easy to use; so I decided to play with this program without going through the trouble of learning to use it first. American data finder had just the right data set for this experiment: Survey of Business Owners data, which among other things can help us quantify number of companies by size and owner’s gender, see if male vs. female-owned organizations earn higher revenue, employ more workers, and/or pay higher salaries to their employees. Let the data discovery journey begin.
After going through a quick registration process , we are up and running with the program featuring an interface that looks rather familiar for any Tableau or Power BI product user out there:
As with other applications, we first need to import our data into the program for further reference. It’s hard to miss the Import Data button prominently featured on Qlik’s interface. Resulting drag and drop interface makes it really easy for us drop our Excel source file into the program/save it in the cloud. After visiting the Fields menu, we can see the list of all available fields for our reference, from Employee Count, to Industry, Gender, Revenue, Payroll, and other dimensions and metrics : 
Qlik Fields listing
1. Column Chart – Employee Count by Industry.
2. Tree Map – Employee Count by Industry by owner’s gender.
Similar to Tableau’s recommended charts and Power BI’s functionality, Qlik offers IQ Insights . This capability is powerful enough to generate a catchy graph literally with a click of a button:
While certainly impressive, this chart can be greatly enhanced by adding more dimensions – what if we used a Fields selection tool and added a gender to the chart? Final output – how about turning it into a Tree Map would look exactly like the title chart of this post. Now we realize that the Construction is the second most popular business type for male owners, while placing in the seventh spot for females. Both gender have Retail trade as a common denominator for the third most popular business type. By now it starts to feel that we are actually telling a story with our data. Perhaps some of the gender-based generalizations and stereotypes are actually based on reality?
3. Scatter Plot – Industry Size: Employees vs. Payroll.
The next step in testing Qlik’s functionality is to see what happens when we drag and drop data fields directly on the chart canvas. When adding a Industry dimension, coupled with Payroll and Employee Count metrics to a blank sheet, program automatically generates below chart. Who knew that while Retail employs considerably fewer workers than Manufacturing , it also generates larger Payroll expense, indicating a greater compensation per worker.
4. Donut Chart – Number of companies by owner’s gender.
What if wanted to play a more active role in our data visualization process and decided to select a specific chart of interest instead of relying on the program to pick the graph type it deems best for our circumstances? This task can be easily accomplished by going to the Charts menu and selecting our chart type. After selecting a pie chart we are asked to specify one dimension and one metric to generate this graph. Pie charts don’t necessarily enjoy the most stellar reputation among all chart types, we can easily turn into a donut chart and by adding gender vs. number of firms registered fields yield the below results. Any given company is more than three (3!) times more likely to be founded by a man than a woman:
In summary Qlik Sense – Clould met my expectations when it comes to ease of use of the program. I found the interface fairly intuitive and was able to generate some of the most common graphs with little problem using trial and error methodology as my training option and without relying on any instructions/tutorials out there. Have you ever used any Qlik products? How was your experience with this software, would you recommend it to others? How does it compare to Tableau and PowerBI?
