An effective and visually engaging way of presenting the main figures in a dashboard is to build a KPI belt by combining text, visual cues, and icons. This type of visualization is very flexible as you can build the structure in a horizontal or vertical manner, use the fonts and colors that best match your dashboard's style, and present virtually any kind of information (raw figures, ratios, comparisons, and so on).

While it may look simple, creating these visualizations usually demands a keen eye, a lot of creativity, and a considerable amount of time. Nevertheless, once you focus on the data and find the best way to present it, the results tend to be stunning.

Here are a few examples of how you can combine objects to create appealing KPI displays. As you can see, some of them are as simple as a label with a modest caption bar, while others involve mixing fonts, colors, sizes, and icons to represent an idea.

Don't hesitate to create your own designs from the scratch. QlikView is a very flexible tool and lets you create amazing visualizations with just a couple of clicks. Just as in a Bob Ross painting, when creating a dashboard, there are no mistakes, just happy accidents. (Don't get too carried away; several happy accidents in a row might upset your stakeholders… especially project managers.)

When we look at a dashboard, our brain automatically creates a hierarchy based on the position, color, and size of the objects that it displays. This is a preattentive behavior that allows us to pay more attention to the items that are considered more important. Therefore, you should be careful while formatting each component in order to highlight only the elements that deserve it. If you want to display a KPI, don't be afraid to use big fonts and bright colors. On the other hand, if you are building an auxiliary label, such as a timestamp of the last reload or clarification notes, it is advisable to deemphasize it using smaller fonts and lighter colors.

We often deal with dashboards that need specific conditions to be met in order to work appropriately. For example, you might need to select only one year, have at least two products available for comparison, or assign a positive integer to a variable.

As you know, every object has a Calculation Condition that blocks it unless all the conditions are met. However, seeing a sheet full of error messages is not a pleasant view. Instead, you can create a text object that covers the rest of the interface and lets the user know which actions are required to go on:

In order to achieve this, go to the Layout tab of the error object (that is, the one that should cover the rest until the conditions are met) and modify its Layer to ensure that it is on top of everything else (the higher layers will cover the lower ones). After that, select Show | Conditional and add a formula to define when it should be displayed:

Text objects are one of the few elements in QlikView that have access to the Actions tab, which opens a wide range of options for the designers. This feature lets you create more appealing buttons to make selections, activate sheets, create bookmarks, or even execute macros. Knowing this, you can use a text object not only to display, but also to modify the contents of a variable. Mixing these elements can help you create interactive controls that enhance the navigation schema and add new functionalities to your dashboards. Also, it is a great alternative to sliders and input boxes.

This is a dirty trick, so use it with caution. If you create a transparent button and set it over other objects, you can create the illusion in interactivity in elements that naturally don't have it. For example, the following dashboard displays six boxes with the main metrics for each department in a company. However, all these labels and images are covered by transparent buttons. When the user clicks on them, an action is triggered, and she is sent to another tab with specific information regarding that area.

The relationship between buttons and variables can go both ways; you can create a text object that modifies the content of the variable, which—in return—changes some of its features (background image, labels, colors, and so on). The best example for this behavior is an interactive switch button:

You can do the following to create this feature:

It is up to you to decide what the impact of pressing this button will be. For example, you can link it to the expressions in a chart so the user can choose which one to see:

Time to mix and match! We've discussed how to create a KPI display and how to build an interactive button. So, why not combine them? For example, the following visualization uses the three boxes on the right not only to show the variance in Sales, Customers, and Budget, but also to control the data that is shown in the table:

The magic behind this lies in a variable that shows or hides the tables to the left while also modifying the buttons' backgrounds. The former is achieved by restricting each chart's visibility (just as we did in the Selection prerequisites section) and the latter is done by calculating the color instead of using a fixed one. For instance, refer to the following code:

if(vMenu='Sales', RGB(245, 245, 245), white()) 

Text objects excel at displaying the main figures in a dashboard, mostly due to their flexibility. You can use them to change the size, font, color, and transparency of a label or simply to add an image. This allows you to represent data in innovative ways. Take for instance the following image:

This is a visualization that depicts the first part of a procurement process. The icons represent each step that must be fulfilled in order to make a purchase. The numbers on top of the arrows represent the average number of days taken to finish the task, and the ones at the bottom illustrate the percentage of the submissions that survive. For example, once they have a quotation, this company spends 7.6 days on average to get the approval from the corresponding managers. Also, only 85 percent of the requests make it through (thus, 15 percent get rejected).

Even though you could display the same information in a traditional table, using this kind of representations often makes the interface easier to understand and gives the user a more pleasant experience.

If you are on a creative streak, you can build an entire dashboard using mostly text objects: labels, icons, visual cues, shadows, backgrounds, buttons, and so on. Such interfaces look amazing on mobile devices and easily capture the user's attention. However, do not forget that complex visualizations require a lot of maintenance; every change that you make will require moving transparent buttons, adjusting the alignment of dozens of objects, and modifying several variables.