Beautiful maps in QlikView

I have to admit it, I’m a big fan of data visualization with maps. And I’m in love with QlikView, so from time to time I spend a few hours investigating new ways of using “old techniques” and new techniques that allow us to use beautiful and useful map visualizations in QlikView.

This summer, QlikTech released a demo application for the 2012 Summer Games in London  which uses two interesting QlikView Extensions: one extension to center-align the content and another extension for the map. As you may have guessed, I’m going to talk about the second one.

Global Games QlikView app released summer 2012.

This extension uses an SVG image , the Raphaël JavaScript library an XML file with the data necessary to draw each country. All this is included in the extension, which means this extension doesn’t need access to Internet to load the map (like the “good old Google Maps technique" or the extensions based on openstreetmaps). I think this is a great “pro”, because not every company can grant internet access to their QlikView Server for security reasons. A “con” is that this map is useful only for Country-level analysis, which is not really bad, but it won’t provide a very detailed map.

Also, it is a very clean, simple, and beautiful map to use in QlikView.

I think this extension is great and could be very useful for the Qlikies around the world, so I created a QlikView application to show off this extension so you can take a look and re-use it in your QlikView apps.

Also, I slightly modified the original extension because of an issue with v11 SR1 and deleting some extra files (please read the note at the end of this post).

All you need to play around with this example is:

•  QlikView Desktop (download from www.qlikview.com)
• The example QlikView Application (download here)
• ‘geoPop’ extension (double click to install) (download here)

Kudos to Brian Munz for creating this cool extension.

NOTE: if you already downloaded and installed the original geoPop extension by Brian from the QlikCommunity, please do a backup of the extension folder before installing this modified version of the extension.