Qlik improvements to sheet navigation

Getting lost in your Qlik app, clicking through endless sheets? Forgetting where that crucial piece of info is hiding? Ever wish you could group related sheets together? Well, guess what? No need to stress anymore! The latest Qlik Sense Cloud update (released on July 9, 2024) has some cool new navigation options that will make your life so much easier.

In this quick overview, I’m going to dive into two awesome improvements: sheet navigation and sheet grouping. I’ll show you what’s changed and share some handy tips on how to use these new features.

First things first, you’ll notice that the sheets button on the top right no longer gives you that drop-down overview of all the sheets. Instead, you now have a sleek new pane on the left side of the screen where you can find all your sheets under the assets tab. Cool, right?

In the sheets pane, the sheets are shown vertically. You can scroll trough them from top to bottom. Next to the sheets we also find the following information in the assets tab:

Bookmarks
Notes
Key Drivers

Bookmarks

The bookmark overview works pretty much the same. You can create a new bookmark, which will then be visible in the tab ‘My own’. From here you can still publish to Public bookmarks when wanted.

Notes

Personal and shared notes will all be visible in the notes overview. Here you can also create notes if wanted.

Key Driver

The last option is where you can create key drivers analyses. For example here I have selected the measure of Avearage Speed and compared it to (at least) three different drivers to see how much influence they have. Good to see that Qlik confirms that more climbing meters means less average speed ;).

Updated Cheat Sheet for New Users

The Qlik Cheat Sheet for New Users is an easy reference that helps new users to find their way through the Qlik hub, navigate dashboards, select and filter data. The new version includes all the latest changes to the Qlik interface.

Grouping Sheets

I’ll admit, it always bothered me that sheets had to be made private just to edit them, and then subsequently never get published back to their original spot. Especially in apps with quite a lot of sheets this could get problematic. Trying to remember the flow was a hassle not just for developers, but also for end-users and business analysts. Scrolling through tons of sheets to find the right bit of analysis was no fun.

But guess what? In the new setup, we can group sheets! Yes! Let’s check it out.

On the right, you’ll see the new Sheet navigation pane. All the sheets are set to private, or as it’s now called, ‘my own’. I’ve got the overview set to list mode, but you can switch to grid mode if you prefer larger icons. Here, I’m using the same Strava app as my example. I usually do analysis on total, ride, and virtual ride (hometrainer) levels. The only way to tell the sheets apart was by naming them. As your app sheet list grows, it gets harder to quickly spot the right one. So, let’s fix that by adding groups:

Step 1: New group

To add a sheet to a group, click the three dots or right-click the sheet, and follow the popout pane to add it to a new group.

Step 2: Name the group and add sheets

I’ve named this first group “Totals”. You can add other sheets by right-clicking and adding them or by dragging and dropping them.

Step 3: Organize groups

After doing this to all your sheets, you’ll have a neat, organized set of groups.

Tips and closing thoughts

The new sheet navigation really fixes some of the issues I had with the old system. It’s a big win for apps with lots of sheets and makes development way easier to manage since you can now group sheets together. It might take a bit of time to get used to the new setup, though, so keep these tips in mind:

Pin the assets tab (1). If you don’t pin it and open the sheets with the button on the top right, the assets tab will stay open. This will cover part of your analytics screen (2) when you close the sheets tab again.

Making changes to a sheet? It’s best to make the whole group private more importantly, preserves the order of the group. You can then make changes without messing up the order of the sheets!

Be aware however: groups still don’t return to their previous order automatically. But dragging and organizing a few groups is way easier than dealing with tons of individual sheets.

In the end I think this is a good move going forward for in app navigation, as well as new options for us as developers to improve app usability.

Maarten Anema

Maarten joined Bitmetric in December 2020, having previously worked extensively with Qlik as a Merchandise Planner within the fashion industry. Coming from a business background, he understands a company’s needs and how to translate their inquiries into a visually appealing dashboard. He enjoys working directly with the business and derives energy from the insights his dashboards provide for end users.

In his spare time, you may find him on a road bike or on the racetrack, trying to be the next Pogacar or Verstappen.

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