Getting Started with Qlik Sense

In today's consumer-driven world, with tremendous competition and rapidly-developing technologies, it is imperative for organizations to leverage data to drive decision-making across all aspects of business to lower costs, increase revenues, and mitigate risks. However, this is much easier said than done; there are hundreds of tools and technologies available in today's market that collect, process, and serve data, but choosing the right technologies is often a challenge. In this book, we discuss one particular technology that provides an enterprise solution for processing and serving analytics: Qlik Sense.

Qlik Sense is a data-discovery and analytics platform composed of an in-memory associative database, a data-extraction and transformation engine that connects to dozens of data sources natively, an intuitive self-service data-modeling and visualization tool, and a set of open APIs that allow for complex customizations of workflow and visualizations. Qlik is a nine-time leader in the Gartner Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant (https://www.qlik.com/us/gartner-magic-quadrant-business-intelligence) and competes in the business intelligence (BI) market as a complete solution for enterprise analytics. Today, Qlik Sense is being used actively in virtually every industry, in hospitals, banks, manufacturing plants, and everywhere in between, to serve up analytics to users so they can make better decisions that drive better outcomes. 

Qlik Sense is a self-contained platform that facilitates all aspects of operating. It is an expanding analytics organization, and as such includes a wide variety of features and functionality, from advanced administrative capabilities to self-service visualization elements to artificial intelligence (AI) engines. This breadth of capabilities, combined with continuing acquisitions of complementary software, such as Podium Data for data cataloging and CrunchBot for natural language processing (NLP), is what helps to differentiate Qlik in the analytics and BI space and provide a truly scalable analytics solution that can serve dozens or hundreds of thousands of users.

In this chapter, we will focus on getting started with Qlik Sense with the Qlik Sense Desktop application and the Qlik Sense Cloud web-based application. We'll provide a quick overview of the high-level features of Qlik Sense, so that it's clear how the Qlik Sense Platform can be leveraged for individuals and in the enterprise, then we will jump into using Qlik Sense. 

We will cover the following topics: 

• An overview of the Qlik Sense product
• The Associative Engine
• Setting up Qlik Sense Desktop
• Setting up Qlik Sense Cloud
• Self-service with Qlik Sense