It is generally accepted that the must have reference for QlikView is the book QlikView 11 For Developers. But what if you want someone to guide you through the book face to face, or you want to deliver training courses based on its contents? Well, you will be requiring the QlikView 11 For Developers Training Materials, or details of when someone is delivering those materials.

No 1 Database Design

The Best Selling Book

QlikView 11 For Developers by Barry Harmsen and Miguel Garcia has been amazingly well received since it became available just over a year ago.  It is consistently one of the top sellers on it’s publishers site and even topped the Database Design charts on Amazon at one point.  Just recently a translation of the book in Spanish was released and this has been selling well also.

Given the strength of the book I was happy to see that Barry and Miguel had put together training materials based on the book, and even more pleased when I was asked to road test the materials for them.  This coincided with a client of mine requiring a training course for six of their staff, each with differing exposure to and experience of QlikView – so all was set to put the materials to the test.

The Course Materials

The first thing that I should state is that one of the conditions of delivering the course material is that each delegate must have a copy of the book with them when taking the course.  This is primarily to enable them to work through the exercises independently.  In the company where I delivered the training they already had a few copies of the book, and the other delegates were pleased to be given perhaps the best course materials they are going to take away from a training course at any time.

Getting Started

The materials themselves consist of fourteen PowerPoint decks with over four hundred slides in total.  These slides work through the book sequentially, and quite handily show the page number that the material relates to at various points.  This is essential for delegates finding the exercises quickly, but also useful for those that were a bit ahead of the curve to read some of the extra content in the book as we were going through.  Also included with the materials is a timing guide for the course, which allows you to work out which modules you are fitting into each day of your course.  I found these timings to be quite accurate, and it allowed me to chop and change things on the fly – fitting  a whistle-stop run through of one chapter at the end of one of the days rather than having to end early or wind up finishing at an inconvenient point.  The overall recommended timing is for a five day course, what I delivered was condensed to three days focusing on the more ‘front end’ aspects – which suited the audience I had.

If you have worked through the book yourself you will already know about the accompanying examples files.  For those who have not yet done this; the examples for the exercises are stored in sensibly named folders and have a solution in the state that the delegates solution should be at the start of each of the chapters.  This means that delegates can choose to work on their own document that they have built from scratch (following the detailed instructions) or, if they have come unstuck somewhere, they can retrieve a document with everything in place for them at the start of the next chapter.  One of the chapters I felt could have had three sets of ‘start points’ as it was a big chapter – but I have fed this back to Barry and hopefully this will be addressed at some point in the future.

The Real Advantage

The real selling point of these materials though is the extensive speaker notes that have been included in the PowerPoint deck.  These will allow someone who is perhaps not an expert on all of the sections still deliver the course – with the notes keeping them one step ahead of the delegates.  Barry and Miguel have even packed in some additional asides not on the slides or in the book.

QlikView vs Traditional

Whilst I would not recommend putting yourself in front of a classroom of delegates without being able to answer those swerve-ball questions you inevitably get, the notes do act as a safety net.  I understand that the latest version of PowerPoint has a nifty feature where you can read the notes of slides ahead of the one you have on the projector behind you, however, I was working with two machines – one for the projector and one for the notes (and trying things out myself before sharing them) and this worked fine for me.

With any training course the proof comes in the form of delegate feedback, and I can honestly say that the feedback from that trial course was overwhelmingly positive – even with me delivering the materials for the first time.  If you want to deliver structured QlikView training as part of your offering then I can highly recommend these course materials.  You can find out more detail on the content and pricing on Barry’s page here:
https://www.qlikfix.com/qlikview-training-materials/ .

If you are looking to be trained you could do a lot worse than finding someone who is delivering these materials.

Get Some QlikView Training

Lily Hill Park

Which leads me neatly on to saying that I am going to be running an open QlikView Training Course in Bracknell, UK in March.  The intention is for this to become a regular event and details of the next course can be found here:
https://www.quickintelligence.co.uk/training/

These courses will give you the opportunity to work through the QV114D materials out of your normal office environment, but also allow you to share ideas and experiences with other delegates – as well as being able to ask me directly any QlikView related questions you may have.

If you want to take your skills to the next level and meet one of the authors of QlikView 11 For Developers then you will want to get along to one of the Masters Summit events, where Barry and other QlikView Legends (Rob Wunderlich, Oleg Troyansky and Bill Lay) will be presenting.