This series of posts is designed to capture the things that I do all the time when building QlikView apps that may not be so obvious to others. This quick tip certainly falls into this camp. If you have ever wanted to move the legend or a label in a chart but have been unable to do so – read on.This is something that I was shown how to do way back when I went on my first QlikView training course. Before the course I had dabbled a bit with QlikView with a bit of help from the manual and QlikCommunity. It was when I was shown that you could move object around within a chart object that I realised I could solve some of the issues I had with chart layouts on the documents I had been playing with. Thanks to Jonas Valleskog for that enlightenment.
Since then, I had assumed that this was something everyone knew from their initial QlikView training. However, on numerous occasions I have used this functionality in the presence of other reasonably experienced QlikView developers and been surprised to find they were unaware.
So… to try and put an end to this here is the simple step you need to take to move objects around inside a chart.
Simply select the chart you want to re-arrange and hold down Shift and Control at the same time. You will see all the items within the chart get a red border to them:
You can then drag the individual items around inside the chart. This include the position of the chart itself, the legend and any text in chart items that you have added. I should warn here than things can sometimes be a bit temperamental – particularly with objects snapping to the side of the object when you don’t want them to – but with a bit of patience you can usually arrange things how you want.
I don’t expect masses of ‘wow thanks for sharing’ messages for this post (as I got for Hidden QlikView Features) but if you have been stuck not being able to move your Text In Chart then you will know how useful this tip is.
Just one of those features that is not entirely intuitive, like holding the Alt key down to then drag and move a chart or list box object that doesn’t have a caption…
This post is part five in the Back-To-Basics series of posts.
wow thanks for sharing
:) Thanks Aldo!
Thanks for this steve. Is there a way to get the legend to the bottom of the chart (horizontal legend , Iegend items next to each other in a horizontal line)?
Sometimes the best way to achieve this is to turn off the chart legends and then add some ‘Text In Chart’ objects. You have more control over orientation and placement of these objects. The downside is though that they don’t move when you resize the chart object – so there needs to be manual tweaking if you move things about.
wow, thanks for sharing! Thank you Steve!
… i would like to set the legends at bottom and i have no idea how to get the symbols
No problems. What is it you are trying to achieve on the bottom legend?
Excelent!! Long time ago i had seen charts having objects in rare places and never did how until now thanks a lot!!!
Glad to have been able to help. Look out for future posts like this one.
And all this time I’ve been switching captions back on just to move a list box. Never knew about the ‘Alt’ feature until your last paragraph, thank you.
Thanks John. Glad the information was useful.
Steve, is there a way to reset the chart to the default positioning of the title and legend etc?
Hi John.
Rather confusingly, this is done with two buttons on the General tab. Click the “Reset User Docking” and “Reset User Sizing” buttons and things should go back to defaults. Note that I said should, it doesn’t always quite work as you want – but it usually helps.
Thank you, I’m from Brasil, start in BI(QlikView) there 1 year, I am connected in your blog.
Hey Steve,
My question will be about container object. Can you think of any way to restrict users to change grid border in the container object?
I tried to change Allow move/size property of the container and the objects inside it. But I couldn’t get it to work..
Hi Omer, I’m afraid I don’t tend to use containers, so am not aware of how you would make this work. I’m surprised that what you try doesn’t do what you want. Probably one for Qlik Community…
Anyway to move it without the menu popping up? Every time I click “Shift” + “Ctrl” the right-click menu shows up and prevents me from moving anything.
The fact that QlikView doesn’t have a program for Macbooks is extremely infuriating.
Hi – that is the only way I know of to move parts of the chart around within the Chart Object. I’m not sure how you can prevent the right click button coming up on the Mac. Perhaps you could try a different virtualisation host, or RDP onto your Windows instance to see if things behave differently then?
Thank you a lot, Steve. Your series Back to Basic is simply fantastic. I have so far read this one about “Moving items…” and that about “Preceding load”. Both helped to improve a lot my experience with Qlikview.
Thanks Marcos, that’s good to hear!
Thanks Steve, is there any way to move the Others series when using dimension limits to be the first value of the series in a graph/ chart?
Hi Grant. I’m not aware of being able to do that. If it’s an absolute requirement then I would look at creating the others bar yourself using a calculated dimension. You would need to use the Rank function to find out if a dimension was in the top n and then have that in an IF statement, with the results either being the original dimension value or a fixed string. You would need to ensure that the fixed value sorts before any dimension value. Good luck!