As a blogger on all things QlikView I naturally try and keep up with what else happens out there in the blogosphere. Here are some blogs I think warrant mention.

As part of our fifth birthday blog series, here is our list of the…

Top Five QlikView Blogs

1. Rob Wunderlich – QlikView Cookbook

This blog takes the top spot, as much for Rob’s massive contribution to Qlik Community as much as the blog itself. When I was first finding my feet with QlikView Rob was one of the contributors on the community whose advice I could really trust (I must mention Michael Splomovich, John Wetherspoon and Miguel Angel Baeyens here also). This sound advice is also imparted through his blog. With his work on the QlikView Components script library and Masters Summits, Rob’s blog is a must follow.

2. Barry Harmsen – QlikFix

The QlikFix finds it’s way into this list not because of detailed tutorials (though it has those) but because of it’s lighthearted approach to things. What would we do without a post that compares QlikView developers to the A-Team? And where else would we learn how to do 90’s style moving ball demos in a scatter chart? It is these things that sets his blog apart and I hope to see many more posts in a similar vein.

With his new colleague, Wesley, adding contributions to the blog as well this blog is well worth a read.

3. Deepak Vadithala – QlikShare

The reason that Deepak takes his well earned place on this list is for sheer effort. As a blogger myself I appreciate the time that goes into well crafted posts. The fact that Deepak has taken to providing a weekly digest of the world of Qlik deserves some recognition. This is on top of the regular brain teasers he shares through the QlikView Question Of The Day site.

If you want a single place for a quick update on what is going on in other blogs and with QlikView in general then Deepak’s blog is a good place to head for.

4. Qlik Staff – QlikView Design Blog

If you like your information from the most reliable source there is, then this is the blog for you. In the last couple of years Qlik has really ramped up its own efforts in blogging. This has resulted in a number of excellent posts in their QlikView Design Blog. All posts here are written by Qlik employees, who specialise in the topics they cover. Contributors such as Apeksha Pathak, Jennell McIntire, Alexander Karlsson and Qlik Legend Henric Cronström provide articles that are always useful and never veer off into being mini sales pitches.

My favourite series on this blog was the Qlik History lesson, where Henric (who has been with Qlik nearly two decades) took the reader through each of the previous versions of QlikView – right back to QuikView 1.0 which came out in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.1. These are insights you can only get from people that are very close to the product. More recently Henric has given one of the best descriptions of the differences between Qlik Sense and QlikView that I have seen.

5. AskQV.com

This final entry is a bit of a cover all, as it is not a blog in itself – rather an aggregator that covers 36 Qlik related blogs (and rising). The reason it is mentioned here is to give kudos to all the other bloggers that are listed on this site – each of whom is adding something valuable to the whole Qlik ecosystem. Part of the whole QlikView experience is not only having the tool but also the routes to find the help you need from a great bunch of people many of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting face to face.

Thank you all for what you bring to the Qlik Party.

The initial idea behind AskQV was to allow a search that didn’t return lots of results from Qlik Community – as the signal to noise ratio on the forum has dropped off a bit recently. To do this we needed to collect together a list of all the reliable sources of information to do the search against. This led to the blog list. Finally a dynamic news feed was added, so you can easily view what articles have been created recently.