28 March 2023
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Vizlib Writeback Table (or just ‘Writeback’) enables users to easily edit, update and comment on data points or entire rows directly in your dashboards, while remaining in the analysis flow. With such power at your fingertips, it’s no surprise that Writeback is fast becoming our most popular extension – and we couldn’t bring you this powerful extension without our powerful team.
In this Q&A blog, we are going to introduce you to Dharmishta Patel, Senior Implementation Consultant at Vizlib and discuss the key things you need to know about Writeback.
Meet Dharmishta, Senior Implementation Consultant at Vizlib
Dharmishta Patel is an integral member of the Customer Success team. Dharmishta’s role as a Senior Implementation Consultant is to help our users get to grips with the Collaboration product. We interviewed Dharmishta to discuss your most commonly asked questions and what best practices she recommends.
What are the top three use-cases you have seen customers build with Writeback?
We see a lot of Financial use cases such as creating Budget Calculators or making Finance adjustments on the fly, however, the three I see most often are:
- Adding commentary to their existing data, for example; multiple comments being added by District Managers in relation to their company KPIs, acquisition, ownership and operational data.
- Flagging Data Quality issues (i.e., creating alerts) and doing something about it on the spot!
- Gathering feedback to monitor progress of weekly meetings, including; feedback from the teams on the value driven criteria, keeping track of goals and achievements, and applying a score so that they can see which meetings were more successful than others.
This allows organisations to improve their process and meeting styles for better productivity. A similar approach can also be applied to the Application Monitoring process. And when Vizlib Teamwork is incorporated as well, this approach becomes even more powerful!
What one feature do you think our customers should try out?
We have recently launched our new feature which enables HTML tooltips. This is great for capturing changes in data clearly with an informative pop up in your Writeback table. Users can also add avatars to quickly see who made the change along with dates and time of creation.
This feature eliminates the need for an Audit Table and therefore provides more sheet space for additional analysis. We’ve seen this feature benefit many of our customers whether it’s to track NPS scores or see more detail behind a KPI (e.g., the associated calculation, link to another page or both!). You can find out more about this new feature in this Monthly Round up video.
What destination types can you write to?
QVD/CSV/TXT, REST, variables and with the Vizlib server there are many integrations available including SQL, Oracle, Snowflake and Google BigQuery databases.
Can I build a hierarchy workflow with this extension?
Yes, this is possible with the Vizlib server along with business logic applied within the Load Script. We have many demo apps that can help users implement this – these are available to download from our Demo Portal, Collaborative Forecasts.
How can we deal with multiple users writing back at the same time?
There are many options available within our Vizlib Server to help deal with concurrency, including; Queue Mode, Auto Lock, Allow Manual Locking. Additionally, our most advanced feature with Writeback is Loop and Reduce Tasks which takes larger apps and breaks them down into several smaller ones using Loop values. Examples of loop values include Cost Centres, Departments, or Teams, but it depends on the use-case!
The most popular method to deal with concurrency seems to be the Queue mode with the Insert operation. This method has interested many of our larger Enterprise organisations – users love that it’s very simple to implement and helps them achieve such efficient results.
What are the differences between the Writeback Table and Input Form?
Writeback enables users to plan, write, and edit data for multiple rows. Vizlib Input Form is similar, but is typically used for one record at a time rather than multiple rows.
Finally, if you could offer just one piece of best practice advice for Writeback, what would it be?
In general, it’s important to optimise the performance of your Qlik Sense applications, however when it comes to Writeback, this becomes paramount. If using Vizlib Writeback Table or Vizlib Input Form, reloads need to be optimised and as fast as possible. If the app reload time is too long, I’d recommend trying to work with binary loads to improve the reload time. You can find more information about this in our documentation.
Get started with Writeback, today!
For sleek dashboards and seamless collaboration, Vizlib’s fully customizable Writeback Table is the key. Writeback lets you edit Qlik dimensions, measures and fields, and add new data using a wide variety of data types – fast. Find a demo app in the product page for Vizlib Collaboration in our user portal or the Demo apps gallery.
Vizlib Writeback Table is part of the Vizlib Collaboration product suite, you can find out more by watching our product demonstration and downloading our product catalogue here.
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