The Qlik way

Qlik has tried to solve all the drawbacks discussed in the preceding section by doing things differently.

First of all, you click and view. You don't need to formulate your question or tell the system more specifically what you want to look at. You just click, and by that, you say "Tell me more about that…". Then you look at the calculation, KPI, or field that might be interesting.

Color coding

The color coding defines the answer. Some things are associated with what you clicked on, and they remain white. Others that are not associated become gray. The color coding is for simplicity. The user quickly gets an overview and understands how things work.

Showing the excluded reveals the unexpected, creates insight, and creates new questions. Hence, the gray color is an important part of making the Qlik experience an associative one—a data dialog and an information interaction—rather than just a database query. Showing you that something is excluded when you didn't expect it means answering...