# Supercharge Your QlikView Dashboards with Containers and Conditional Enabling

- Canonical: https://33rdsquare.com/qlikview-container-conditional-enabling/
- Published: 2024-09-03
- Author: Jordan Brown
- Categories: [Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning & ChatGPT](https://33rdsquare.com/category/tech/ai/)

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As an artificial intelligence and machine learning expert, I‘m fascinated by the power of data visualization to surface insights. But too often, BI dashboards become cluttered and overwhelming, obscuring the most important data points. Effective dashboard design is both an art and science – and QlikView‘s containers are an essential tool for achieving the optimal information density.

In this in-depth guide, I‘ll share practical techniques for using QlikView containers and conditional enabling expressions to build highly effective, user-friendly dashboards. Along the way, I‘ll dive into the psychology behind progressive disclosure, share real-world examples and benchmarks, and even explore how AI could help automate the process.

Whether you‘re a QlikView beginner or a seasoned pro, this post will give you a framework for thinking about dashboard layout and reveal the full power of containers to maximize information density. Let‘s get started!

## The Science of Progressive Disclosure

Before we jump into the technical details of containers, let‘s consider the underlying psychology. Why are containers such an effective way to organize dashboard content?

It comes down to a concept called progressive disclosure – the idea that humans can only process a limited amount of information at a time, so interfaces should initially show only the most necessary information, then reveal more details on demand [^1](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/progressive-disclosure/).

Think about how you read a newspaper: you start with the front page headlines, then selectively dive into the articles that interest you. Containers replicate this experience in a dashboard: key summary metrics are always visible, while supporting details are easily accessible in a sidebar or tabbed interface.

This approach minimizes cognitive load and allows users to focus on one perspective of the data at a time. And the research backs this up: a study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that progressive disclosure can make an interface 30% easier to use [^2](https://www.nngroup.com/reports/auto-forwarding-carousels/).

## Benchmarking Container Efficiency

So how much of an impact can containers actually have on information density? Let‘s run the numbers.

Consider a typical dashboard with 6 KPI widgets:

| Widget | Dimensions (W x H) | Area |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Sales | 400 x 200 | 80,000 |
| Profit | 400 x 200 | 80,000 |
| Quantity | 400 x 200 | 80,000 |
| Region | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Category | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Month | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Total |  | 300,000 |

If each widget is placed directly on the sheet, the total area is 300,000 square pixels. But what if we consolidate the KPIs into a single container?

| Object | Dimensions (W x H) | Area |
| --- | --- | --- |
| KPI Container | 400 x 200 | 80,000 |
| Region | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Category | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Month | 200 x 100 | 20,000 |
| Total |  | 140,000 |

By using a container, we‘ve reduced the total area by over 50%! And this efficiency multiplies as you add more content. A single well-organized container could easily house a dozen or more charts that would normally clutter the entire dashboard.

## Qlik Container Setup: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that you understand the why of containers, let‘s dive into the how. Follow these steps to start using containers in your own QlikView apps:

1. **Create the container.** Right-click on the sheet and select "New Sheet Object" > "Container". Drag the sizing handles to adjust the dimensions.
2. **Add objects to the container.** Right-click the container and select "Properties". In the General tab, click "Add" to select the charts, lists, and other objects to include.
3. **Customize the container layout.** In the Presentation tab, choose the tab positioning, style, and other options:

![Container properties window showing Presentation tab options](https://i.imgur.com/HjK9Ozu.png)

1. **Apply conditional enabling.** Select an object within the container. In the object‘s properties, go to the Layout tab and check "Conditional" under "Show". Enter your conditional enabling formula in the text box:

![KPI object properties window showing conditional show expression](https://i.imgur.com/xMDEoeu.png)

1. **Add user-friendly touches.** Pay attention to small details like tab names, colors, and fonts. Make sure the container is easy to find and interact with.
2. **Test and iterate.** View your sheet in different screen sizes and selections states. Gather feedback from users and keep refining the container until it‘s optimized.

Here‘s an example of how the final container setup might look with 4 tabs conditionally enabled based on user selections:

![QlikView container example showing 4 tabbed KPI objects](https://i.imgur.com/T2FMCxD.png)

## Creative Use Cases

Once you‘ve mastered the basics of containers, you can start to push the boundaries with more imaginative applications. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

- **Simulate Navigation**: Use container tabs as a menu system, wiring up actions to change variables that control conditional shows.
- **Interactive Alerts**: Set up a container with a grid of KPIs that change color and become visible based on thresholds. Users can click into an alert to see more diagnostics in the other tabs.
- **Animated Insights**: Use a variable to cycle through different chart types, creating the effect of an animated insight as the user flips through the container.
- **Drilldown Stories**: Set up a branching drilldown flow where each container tab is a "chapter" of the data story. Conditionally enable the tabs based on user selections.

The beauty of containers is their flexibility – if you can dream it, you can probably build it! Over time, you‘ll start to see applications for containers in almost every dashboard.

## Advanced Techniques

For the power users out there, here are a few advanced techniques to take your containers to the next level:

- **Dynamic Expressions**: Use variables and set analysis to build conditional enabling logic that automatically adapts to user selections and role-based permissions.
- **Master Containers**: Define a template container as a master object, then create linked copies across multiple apps for easy updates and customization.
- **API Integration**: Populate container contents dynamically from external data sources and APIs, opening up new opportunities for real-time analytics and alerting.
- **Extension Objects**: Use the visualization extension API to create custom container-like objects that mash up web content, maps, and other non-native Qlik content.

## The Future: AI-Enhanced Dashboards

As an AI practitioner, I can‘t help but imagine a future where machine learning helps automate the "last mile" of the dashboard design process.

For example, what if Qlik could learn from user behavior to automatically generate conditional enabling expressions? By analyzing the sequence of selections and user clicks, an AI model could infer the optimal information to show at each stage and dynamically organize containers to maximize value.

As a starting point, Qlik could provide suggestions for different metric combinations and chart types to include in a container based on patterns in the data model. Users could then fine-tune and curate those machine-generated containers.

Longer-term, I envision an AI-powered dashboard designer that can automatically mock-up an entire interface by learning from best practices and observing how users interact with the data. Containers and conditional enabling would be one of many layout levers the AI would manipulate to create bespoke, auto-adapting dashboards.

These may sound like far-off ideas, but the building blocks – usage tracking, recommendation systems, auto-generation – already exist in today‘s AI. As data literacy increases and natural language processing evolves, AI will play an ever-increasing role in guiding the dashboard design process.

## Conclusion

Containers are a deceptively simple concept – group things together and show/hide them as needed. But as we‘ve seen, they have the power to profoundly impact dashboard usability and ROI when used strategically.

Remember these key points as you embark on your own container journey:

1. Think progressive disclosure: Focus each container on a single theme and sequence them logically.
2. Maximize information density: A single well-organized container can often replace 3-4 individual charts.
3. Be judicious with conditional enables: Use them to focus attention and minimize clutter, not to hide important information.
4. Keep experimenting: The more you use containers, the more applications you‘ll find – there‘s no one "right" way!
5. Plan for AI: Start tracking usage patterns and edge cases now to build a foundation for AI automation down the road.

Dashboard design is ultimately a human-centric process – your goal should always be to understand and meet the needs of your end users. But by wielding the power of Qlik‘s containers and conditional enables, you can design interfaces that are exponentially more intuitive, insightful, and actionable.

I hope this guide has given you both the technical foundation and creative inspiration to start building better dashboards with containers. If you have any other tips or examples to share, please leave a comment below – I‘d love to hear from you!

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Source: [Supercharge Your QlikView Dashboards with Containers and Conditional Enabling](https://33rdsquare.com/qlikview-container-conditional-enabling/)