QlikView lets us select data in many different ways: listboxes, clicking in charts and entering search terms, just to name a few. While this is incredibly flexible, it can also become hard to see which information is actually selected at any given moment.
Fortunately, QlikView has an option to show the user exactly which selections are currently applied to the data: the Current Selections dialog. To open this dialog, we simply need to press Ctrl + Q or select View | Current Selections from the menu bar. This floats the Current Selections dialog window on top of our worksheet. Once we have had a glance at the Current Selections window, we can close the dialog.
It is sometimes useful to permanently display the Current Selections dialog. This is where the Current Selections Box object comes in handy. To add a Current Selections Box object to our Dashboard sheet, follow these steps:
- Select Layout | New Sheet Object | Current Selections Box.
- Click on OK to apply the settings and close the New Current Selections Box dialog window.
The resulting Current Selections Box will look like the following screenshot. Notice how every selection you make is added to the displayed list. Also note that we did not change any of the settings in the Current Selections Properties dialog, you may want to review the options yourself at a later time.
Besides being a great place to quickly look at the applied filters, the Current Selections Box option also allows us to interact with the selections in the following ways:
- Erasing filters: By clicking on the corresponding erase icon for any of the displayed fields, the selection over that field will be cleared.
- Modifying selections: By clicking on the drop-down icon, a list of that corresponding field's values will be displayed, from which we can further refine our selection and select other values, just like with a listbox.
- By right-clicking on each of the displayed filters, we can issue additional commands such as Select Excluded, Select All, Clear, or Clear Other Fields.