Let's go ahead and look at the first topic – setting up the structure for development. We will use the following steps to do this:

1. The first step is to navigate to the directory where you want to set up the application, which can be anywhere in your system.
2. Here, we will create a new folder, and you will give it a very meaningful name that will represent our development. Let's say, in this example, or for this course, we will look at some data related to airlines and their metrics. So, we'll name our folder Airline Metrics.

3. Then, we will create another folder for the apps, so we will name this Apps. This will contain the QlikView apps, and then, we will create another folder for data, named Data, which will contain all the datasets we will use.
4. Then, if you have some images and other things that you want here, you can create a...

In this section, we will talk about how you can create an app. Here, we will create an air traffic statistics application, and save it in the folder that we created in the previous section.

For this, let's go to QlikView and create the app. Here, we will click on New to create an app, and, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Started with QlikView, we won't be using the wizard.

Once you have created a new app, you need to save it by clicking on the Save button. We will navigate to the Airline Metrics | Apps folder, and then save our app as AirlineMetrics.qvw.

If everything goes well, the directory path where we saved the app will be displayed in the title bar at the top of the window.

If you are not interested in getting this entire path, what you can do is go into Settings -> Document Properties, and give a title:

Here, let's name it Airline...

In this section, we will learn how to import data from Excel. We will see how to use the data from Excel to display data in QlikView.

For that, let's go to the QlikView application that we created in the previous section, the Airline Metrics application. To import the data, we need to click on the Edit Script button in the toolbar. We can also use the shortcut Ctrl + E for easy access. This is an important item that you need to remember, because, most of the time, you will go here to load the data into QlikView, or to manage your scripts. The following screenshot shows what the Edit Script button looks like:

Now, let's go into the script by using Ctrl + E. This opens up a script window where a few variables have been prepared automatically for you:

These are nothing but the variables that have been set as a default for the system. For example...

In this section, we will look at what facts and dimensions are, and the best practices for representing facts and dimensions.

Let's go to QlikView, where we have loaded the data in the previous section. If you remember, we went into the Edit Script window, loaded the data table, and gave it the name Airlines Data. If we want to see the data, we can use the table viewer. So, if I go to the table viewer, right-click on the table, and click on Preview, we can see some sample data from the table as seen in the following screenshot:

While exploring the data, we will notice that there are two different types of data in the table, namely numeric data, and textual data.

In this section, we'll look at the various methods you can employ to select the data in a list box.

Let's go to the QlikView application and work on list boxes. We will use the data from the previous section and continue using it here. Let's select a few fields to integrate into a list box by holding the Ctrl button and selecting them. Once you have selected them, click Add. All of these filters will be displayed on the right-hand side, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once that is done, we will click on the OK button, which leads us to this dashboard display:

You can manually either drag each list box to the required location, or you can use the Arrange option as well. To do that, you can go into the Layout menu in the toolbar, and click on the Rearrange Sheet Objects option. If you click on that option multiple times, it will...

In this section, we are going to cover how to create a new tab, rename a tab, and change the look and feel of a tab. Let's get started.

We will go into the QlikView application and open the document that we have been working on so far, the Airline Metrics application. Now, we will create another tab other than Main for ease of use. We will go into the Layout menu and click on Add Sheet:

Once that is done, another blank screen will appear, where we can paint whatever picture we want to.

Now, if you want to rename it for a specific use case, you can right-click on the tab and go to the Sheet Properties, and, in the General tab, you can change the sheet name in the Title textbox. Let's rename it Dashboard, and then click Apply. Some additional options present in the display include the background styling:

As seen in the preceding screenshot, there are...

In this section, we will look at how to add filters in the app, and the different ways to add the filters.

So, let's go to the QlikView application, and here we are in the dashboard tab:

The first way to add filters is by right-clicking on the screen and clicking the Select Fields option from the drop-down menu, which shows us the following window:

Another way of doing it is that you can right-click on the window, go to the New Sheet Object menu, and click on the List Box... option. This gives us the following window:

Here, you have the option of selecting the field that you want to add. So, with the help of these different options, you can add the list box on your screen, and use it as a filter to refresh your dashboard for your application. So, we have now covered how to add filters to your app.

This brings us to the end of the chapter. In this chapter, we learned how to set up folders for our app, and how to create it on QlikView. Then, we learned how to import data into QlikView from Excel files. We learned about various terms in QlikView, such as facts, dimensions, and list boxes. We learned how to create new tabs in our application and how to sort them. Finally, we learned how to add filters to our application to sort our data properly.

In the next chapter, we will look at how to create data models in QlikView.