BI vendor Qlik has released the new version for Qlik Sense on Windows. Qlik Sense August 2023 focuses primarily on improvements to visualization capabilities, navigation and design.
The August release is the third client-managed release this year and includes a variety of new customization and styling options, as well as new support for Parquet files, which offers storage space savings and improved query performance for large data sets, among other improvements. Again, some of the new features were previously available in the cloud version of Qlik Sense.
New styling settings in the “App Options”
New styling settings in the “App Options” allow the toolbar and sheet title to be turned on or off for all sheets. Disabling them creates more space for the content. In addition, the selections for titles and the navigation bar can be customized.
Updated design for chart hover and selection menu
The chart hover and selection menu have been redesigned with the August release for better customization and to add new visual styling options to the chart rendering.
Enhanced options for bar charts
New options have been added for bar charts to switch between different dimensions or measures within the same chart. To do this, a simple toggle switch can be added via the “show condition” expression. The new functionality gives more control, improves customizability, and also saves time and space.
New design options for Qlik Sense chart legends
Improved design options for legends now provide more flexibility and customization in this area as well. The new legend design is available for line, bar, pie, marimekko, waterfall, scatterplot, and distribution plot charts. Available options include new font family, font size, and color for titles and labels.
New customization windows for line charts, button objects and tree maps
The font styling for line charts has been updated to use the Nebula framework. The styling includes titles, subtitles, and footnotes, and provides options for font size, color, and family.
In addition, the design of button objects can now be changed. The enhancement allows text size to be set as fixed, fluid (resizing relative to button height), or responsive (scaling to always fit).
Moreover, a new window now allows the appearance and behavior of tree maps to be customized to meet company, department, or personal style requirements. For example, font size, color, title, subtitle and footnotes can be changed. Background image and background color can also be selected.
App enablement status visibility in the user interface
Qlik Sense August 2023 also brings a new feature for Insight Advisor. For example, a notification banner with the app enablement status is now displayed when the natural language features (Insight Advisor Search and Chat) are enabled for an app. This notifies users when apps are ready to support search, so they don’t try to access the feature before indexing is complete.
Support for reading and writing Parquet files
Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format that is particularly useful for storing and querying large amounts of data. Qlik Sense on Windows now supports reading data from Parquet files and saving tables as Parquet files.
By using Parquet, specific columns in a table can be targeted for querying instead of reading the entire table. In this way, it is well suited for processing large amounts of data. In addition, Parquet supports efficient compression and encoding of data, which can further reduce storage space and improve query performance.