QlikView developers can learn development skills with many books available to choose from. Yet, besides Karl Pover’s learning data visualization book, no other book has focused on designing dashboards to tell story effectively.

Well, that void has been filled quite nicely with Julian’s book, Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView,  on every aspect of creating minimalistic yet effective dashboard design. Many of you know about Julian’s blog, Qlikfreak, where he shares plethora of tips on data visualization.

Simplicity is about eliminating the obvious (and everything else that doesn’t support your purpose), and enhancing the meaningful. — The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

This book teaches you how to eliminate chart junk — for those of you who adore Edward Tufte — yet also embracing Nigel Holmes’s style of adding art to help you convey meaning of data effectively.

I have seen countless dashboards filled with clutter and noise; at best they confuse and at worst they mislead those who struggle to gain insight from these dashboards.

I am a firm believer that unless you learn QlikView dashboard visualization best practices, most effective data model dies a horrible death.

In this book, Julian takes you to a full journey of building most effective dashboards starting from understanding pain point of your audience and then developing dashboard using effective ways to gradually revealing granular data associated with certain KPI(Key Performance Indicator).

You will learn how to create some of the favorite Tufte charts such as Slope Graph and dot plot chart. You will learn every minute detail of dashboard design with the purpose of conveying meaningful story.

You will not only learn which chart to use when but will also learn bit more about research by William Cleveland and Robert McGill related to human perception and how to choose graphic for accurate data representation.

With humor, you will learn when and how to use adorable gauge charts and why pie charts are not that bad for your survival as QlikView expert.(Stephen Few may not agree but that’s okay!)

In nutshell, Julian’s book teaches you how to become a master story teller with purpose not to dazzle your audience but rather to help them uncover  important trends and outliers effortlessly.

I will end this with my favorite quote from E.B.White in his book, Element of Style.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. —E.B.White, Element of style