If ever I am asked about the report writer in QlikView I repeat what I was told on my initial training course – QlikView is not a report writing tool. That said – QlikView Reports can sometimes fill a need.
The Best Report Tool?
The power and the beauty of QlikView lies in it’s associative engine and zero wait analytics capabilities. It is in this that I think QlikView stands head and shoulders above other tools. It is not entirely the case with the Report Writer though.
If you like spooling sheets of paper from your printers or sending hefty PDF attachments then it may be that you need to be looking for another tool. If on the other hand you are already using the associative power of QlikView but need a hard copy of what you see on screen with better print resolution than a straight page print gives you, or you want to see all the rows from your table (not just what you can see without scrolling) then read on.
QlikView Report Overview
The basic premise of QlikView Reports is that you drag objects from your desktop app onto a page. To do this select Reports and then Edit Reports and follow the dialogues to add a report and edit it. Position the window to one side of the screen so that you can drag objects from your app onto the report page. Once saved and exited you can access your report from the Reports menu, at which point you will be presented with a standard print dialogue. If your document is saved to Access Point, then the report can be called from there also.
This quick video shows the basics of creating reports.
More Advanced Features
There are also plenty of other features within QlikView Reports beyond what is shown in the video.
For example you can create a ‘band’ over a data item at both Report and Page level. This means at a report level you can generate a set of pages for each Office (for example) and then have each page loop around another field, such as the Supplier. Each report can have many pages added to it, and if you wanted each page could therefore have a different band on it.
Also useful is the multi-sheet setting on a page. This should be checked if you want to include a table which will run over multiple pages. Be careful placing tables in your report with a massive number of rows – on a single sheet page the text will print tiny and on a multi-sheet page lots of pages will be created – perhaps more than you expect.
You will also find most of the options you would expect to find in a report writer – such as headers and footers and the ability to go from portrait to landscape layout. The way you place images in to headers and footers is a bit quirky and you will need a high-res version of any images as screen formatted images will print very small. A bit of trial and error may be required here.
The Limitatons
One of the limitations of the tool is that at the point you print you can only have one set of selections in force (instead of different selections on each page – unless you use Set Analysis) and any Cycle groups will be in the state they are in on screen when you print. This typically means you have to create clones of your on screen charts specifically for printing. This approach does have the advantage though that you can adjust font sizes and settings (such as Show Sort Indicator and Show Selection Indicator) specifically for output to a page. What I tend to do is create a Reports sheet in my app and on here have all text, charts and tables I want to include on Reports. This sheet can then be hidden from users with a Calculation Condition. Objects on this sheet can all be minimised as they will still appear normal on the page.
Once you start creating reports you will soon discover some of the frustrations with it. Alignment and sizing is trickier than on screen. Legends can mysteriously appear in a different place to where they do on the on screen counterpart of a chart (and even between print preview and printed page). Also, objects can appear with different relative sizes to on the screen (a simple trick to resolving this is to multi select objects before dragging them to a report page). Despite the limitations there is usually a way of achieving the desired results.
Conclusion
QlikView’s Reports are almost certainly the most maligned aspect of the product. However, it may be the best route to get from your existing dashboard to something that prints reasonably well or is exported to a PDF.
We strongly recommend the use of a third party product like NPrinting for producing static output, but if your requirements are not too challenging you may find that the QlikView Report editor will fill your need.
hi steve, great job!
Do you know if there is some way to make a report in Qlikview that have just one big table (that will be printed in many pages) and on each page we have the subtotal of one specific expression?
thanks
Hi Danilo – that certainly sounds like an interesting challenge! You can obviously break a long table over many pages in a QlikView report without too much difficulty. What I can’t think of is a way to know that you are on the last line of a page in order to write out the running total. Anyone else have any ideas?
Hi Steve,
I want to ask you how we can take long pdf report in QV on web. This report 45 pages and we can not take this all time.
Actually, this error is not for everyone. Some users can take this but other can not.
We are using ajax and server is 256 gbram and 16 cpu.
Also Clint is working perfectly about pdf report.
Thank you.
To create large reports you are better off passing the work over to a service. The one we recommend and sell is NPrinting. With this you can have your reports run on a schedule and available to download quickly – or sent out via email. Creation of reports is also much simpler than the QlikView Report tool – as Microsoft tools such as Excel and Word can be used to create templates. Please see our NPrinting page at https://www.quickintelligence.co.uk/nprinting/ for more details.
Hi,
When I am trying this, the colors of the charts are changing to black and white. Can anyone help me to understand why is it so.
Hi Niharika. On the colours property tab the I’d a tick box for “use patterns instead of colours”. By default this is ticked for reports. You need to ensure it if not ticked and click apply. I guess when they made that the default more people printed in monochrome than colour.
Hey
I need to print multiple tables in a QlikView Report. The table contents would be based on the selection in dashboard. Is there a way to auto layout the table according to the number of rows. For example, the position of the table will automatically adjust to the height of the table above it.
Hi Shivank, as the article mentions the native QlikView reports are not it’s strongest feature. A table can expand and extra pages can be added automatically, but tables below the one that is expanding will not move (unless on a different page). Rather than improving the Reporting feature Qlik have recently acquired NPrinting. This tool has much more flexibility around reporting and will do what you require.
Is there any way to have captions display in a report for sheet objects?
Hi,
Not as far as I am aware. What you need to do is have text boxes that have the same captions and place those in the report. If you use variables for the caption and text box then a change to what is shown on the screen will also be reflected on the report. It’s a shame that there is no way of showing the caption in the report instead, but the work around is not too painful.
Hi Steve,
I want to ask that does QlikView provide reports in row data format like Oracle Apex to users ?
Hi, I’ve not used Oracle Apex, but there are numerous ways of getting data out of QlikView in a row format.
If users have AccessPoint access to the app they will be able to right click on a chart or table and choose to download the data behind it.
During the load script you can write information out using a STORE statement (see Write To CSV With STORE).
There is an add on product called NPrinting that can you can distribute data with (see NPrinting Product Details)
how to use report editor in angular js with html using web api .how to download report editor free trail..
This is not something you can do with the QlikView report editor, or QlikView for that matter. You should look at Qlik Sense (which has a free Desktop) and look at the API and what you can do with that and JS.
Is there any way to add hyperlink in first page to navigate
to other pages in multiple page qlikview pdf
Hi Preeti,
Certainly not that I’m aware off. You can do this in the QVW, but this would not transfer across to the PDF. As there is no template for the reports created by the QlikView Report writer you could not create the link there either. It may be possible in NPrinting, but even then I doubt it as this uses a printer driver to go from a Office template to a PDF – and this would not respect any internal links.
Hi Steve,
please let me know can I generate large excel report in Nprinting having 140 sheets. The sheets have vlookups from one data sheet in same report.
Appreciate your quick response.
Thanks
In NPrinting you can pick a field and assign that to a tab (by selecting it under the Page option in the editor). This will give you a sheet for every unique value in that field. You can then place data related to each field value in those created sheets. It sounds, however, that you want to output all the data to a single sheet, and then automatically create a sheet per data item that references the main sheet? This should be possible, by putting your VLookups on one sheet to look at the range on the other, then add the Page to the one with the VLookup. It’s not a use case I have tried though.
Hope that helps.
Where is the report layout and structure held, as I copied the QVW from our Test to Production, and none of the changes appeared.
Hi Basil. QlikView reports are embedded in the QVW file. When you copy a file between environments Reports should be taken across with them. If the report is not appearing on the target server it may be that you have a show criteria on the report which isn’t being met on the new server?
Thanks Steve, that’s what I thought but it’s the first time I had seen this happen. Maybe an older copy of the file was copied. Thanks for the Info
Regards
Basil
Hi,
Is it possible to produce pixel perfect Invoice style reports with multiple sections and multiple pages in Qlikview. Also multiple version of the report (with parameters such as customer ID passed ) should be produced in a batch framework ideally linking to external schedulers like Control-M.
I have created lot of tabs with all the required information but finding it difficult to produce a sequential section report with dynamic headers and footer.
This is quite easy in traditional reporting tools which usually is done as a report with sub-reports inside in a sequential order.
I was told that Qlik Nprinting is the tool to be used for this kind of reports but we do not have license for Nprinting hence trying to produce in Qlkiview itself.
Before we spend lot of time on this, would like to know if this is practically possible.
Thanks for your comment. It sounds like you have found where the limitations of the embedded QlikView reporting tool are. As far as banding is concerned you can place a band on the report (which will loop through a dimension) and another band on each page. You can therefore achieve one level of nested band. Pages have headers and footers, which can do similar to the pre-band and post-band sections in other report writers – but they do not work quite so well.
The biggest draw-back of the embedded report tool is in how fiddly it is to resize and align objects, particularly tables which can expand or extract. I’ve lost plenty of time trying to get things looking right for clients in the past. The great thing about the report writer is that users can pull reports down from without Access Point, if they have rights to the app.
The Pixel Perfect editor in NPrinting is all the things you would expect form a report editor, and NPrinting itself does what you would expect in terms of distribution options. You can line things up correctly and scale as required – even having table headers in the pre-band section and the body below. You can manage page breaks and be very precise with formatting as well.
There is an API for the latest NPrinting releases, which I haven’t yet put through it’s paces, but with the built in scheduler I can’t see any reason why you would need to call the API from an external scheduler.
You should be able to get a trial licence for NPrinting to give it a go, if you ask your Qlik responsible partner.