What was new at Qlik Connect?

What is happening in Qlik Sense?

Not everything at Qlik Connect was about AI, there’s a lot going on in traditional BI too.

Qlik Sense users will notice a new navigation menu. All the navigation will be moved to the left-hand side, where your sheets can be organised into groups.

The new extension objects – Pivot Table/Straight Table/Layout Container – are improved further and in Qlik Cloud Analytics you see improvements almost weekly:

• The Pivot Table will get a chart exploration menu where the user can select fields and change the pivoting without having to edit the object.
• The Layout Container’s freedom of design will hopefully also be available as an option directly on the sheets.

Styling options are added to all objects and the Copy/Paste Style is a long-sought improvement.

Qlik Sense has collaboration on the script development, later this year they will add collaboration and sheet development. When co-developing on sheets, you will see which objects the other developer is currently working with, in a way that is similar to how you can collaborate in Microsoft Office. An implication of this will be that a sheet no longer has to be private to be edited in Qlik Cloud.

On the back-end they are finally adding folder structures in Spaces. I really hope they improve the way you delete files in a space as well.

One of the biggest changes to Qlik Sense is the ways you can add data to applications. They are introducing a new regime for that with three options; Scripting, Single Table, and a new No-code editor:

• Table (Qlik Cloud only) will use the interface that Talend has for creating recipes for cleansing data. This is initially intended for simple/single table use cases but I see the potential for using this in any application.
• No-code is the implementation of the Talend Data Flow editor into Qlik Sense where it will generate Qlik Scripts. As a replacement of the old no code “bubbles” I think this is really interesting also for the advanced developers. I’m a bit concerned though, about how optimised the load scripts will be? They are releasing this later this year so we need to wait a bit to see.
• Scripting will remain pretty much the same as today, but they are adding support for script files (qvs) for reuse of scripts between different applications. The implementation is really cool as it will show the qvs script inline with the code in the script editor of the application calling the script file. This will make debugging so much easier.

Qlik Cloud Reporting

The big news are first the Pixel Perfect Report Editor they are working on that will be great for any report that is customer facing.

Second is the on-demand functionality for Tabular Reporting where the users will be able to make selections and get a report based on the selected data.

Qlik AutoML

Qlik AutoML will get added support for evaluating your models without having to deploy them to Qlik Sense first. This is done by embedding a Qlik Sense application directly into the AutoML front-end where you can compare the performance of models and drill down into specific features.

Platform Management

Reload task chaining, which has been missing in Qlik Cloud – unless you use Automations for it – will be added in a really nice visual manner. They will not be automations, but can be converted to an automation if you need added functionality in the task chain such as calling other systems, etc. A task chain reload will not count against your automation quota.

Controlling what a user can do in the Cloud platform will be more granular as they are introducing Scopes. Currently the only available scope is whether a user can download data from a chart in the applications. The tenant admin will be able to edit the user default and new scopes will not be automatically added for all users.

Talend Fabric

Talend Fabric has got a complete graphical workover to gain a modern look and feel.

On the feature side, the biggest addition is the new blocks for preparing data for LLMs and GenAI – the same addition that is also available in Qlik Talend Cloud.

Summary

In summary, Qlik Connect was really good this year and if the feeling previous years has been more of a “marketing messaging” on what Qlik wanted to do, this year’s messages are “market ready” or really close to be released.

Of the things not yet released, I’m most excited about trying out Qlik Answers and the No-Code scripting in Qlik Sense. And yes, the release of folders in spaces and task chaining are also on my top list.

The future looks bright for all Qlik lovers.