My 5 lessons from working with Alteryx professionally
In this article I will give the 5 best lessons that I have learned from working with Alteryx professionally as a Data Analyst
(You can also find the article on my website together with other articles and more interesting things)
1. The Alteryx Community is amazing
This statement can not be understated.
The Alteryx Community is the best data community that I have found out there.
Even before I began to work professionally with Alteryx I liked the community, and I love it as of now when I utilize Alteryx every day.
I would really encourage you to use it if you want to get better at Alteryx in your daily work.
If I would pick two things from the community that I would say benefits someone that want to increase their knowledge in Alteryx, it would be these two:
Weekly Challenges
The weekly challenges are a great way to learn the tools inside Alteryx better.
I became one of the 70 people in the world to finish 150 of these weekly challenges during last year.
All the tools that I have used regularly have been part of some of these challenges, as well as many more tools that I have not found time to use yet.
The challenges are built up in that you get a case, an input and a solution to the problem. Your task is to transform the input to get to the solution.
What I really like about these challenges is that after you have submit your answer, you can see how other people have solved the problems as well, sometimes in ways that you never had though about.
The challenges can help to increase the performance of your data flows, introduce you to new tools, new way to use the tools or other things that can really bring some new insights.
Alteryx Designer Discussions (And other Discussions Forums)
Generally, the discussion forums on the Alteryx Community are a really good resource when working with Alteryx.
There are three ways, at least, that you can use the forum which will make an impact in your knowledge of Alteryx:
- Search for problems that have been answered earlier
Most of the times if you come up with a problem it has already been solved by someone.
Search for the problem in the search bar and you can find a lot of information about the problem, as well as often a workflow you can download together with the answer.
- Ask questions if you can not find the answer
People are really quick with answering you if you have any questions in the community.
So if you can not find the answer, ask your question (Best if you can have an example workflow inserted) and you will most probably get a good answer.
- Answer other peoples question
This is also a good way to become better at Alteryx yourself.
By answering other peoples question you will both help other people and learn Alteryx better by having to explain it to others.
2. Cache data makes your User Experience much better
I would add “Cache data” as its own tip because it has helped me a lot when developing workflows in Alteryx. Below are a number of reasons why caching data has helped me a lot in my Alteryx work.
1. Much better user experience working with workflows
If you ever have tried to click around in a workflow and wonder why you have to wait so much between every click, it is probably because your input tools have a live connection and tries to gather data between every click.
By caching (Saving the data in memory) while developing new workflows it will be much quicker to work with the workflow in Alteryx.
When you cache the data, you are saying to Alteryx to not gather any new data after the point that you cache the data.
2. Possibility to work with more data without stressing the original data source
Even if oftentimes you only want to bring in subpart of the overall data, to see if the joins and other formulas work the right way, there are times when you want to bring in all data as well.
This is especially true when you are just beginning with a new project and want to investigate which data you really have access to.
By caching the data you can bring in more data, investigate the data, using Select clauses to limit the data.
Later on you can move these Select clauses into the input tools when you want limit how much data you want to gather from the original source.
3. There are much more to Alteryx than just the Workflow creation
The more you work with Alteryx, the more you learn about all the other parts that makes Alteryx a great tool, besides only working with creation of workflows.
The more you work with Alteryx, the more you learn about all the other parts that makes Alteryx great, besides the workflow creation.
Besides are some of the things that I think are good parts of the Alteryx toolkit, besides the workflow creations.
1. Scheduling in Alteryx Server
This one is closely related to workflow creation, but it is one of the main things that makes Alteryx Designer possible to rely on in your business.
Maybe you are a person that loves to wake up at 6 AM every morning to open up all of your amazing workflows and click “Run”, one by one.
But if you are like most people, this is probably not the task that is so interesting.
Alteryx Server comes to the rescue here by easily letting you set up schedules for your workflow to run on specific times. It makes your life easier and makes the workflow more reliable to the end users.
2. Alteryx Apps
Everyone loves Apps.
Everyone have Apps.
Why not introduce people to Apps in Alteryx as well.
Apps are probably one of the best ways to get your end users included in Alteryx as well.
By giving them the possibility to run workflows themselves as well as different output given the input they chose, this is a great way to increase the self service inside the organization.
3. Workflow sharing
By sharing the workflows on Alteryx to other end users they can themselves run the workflow at the times when they want.
Scheduling is sometimes not enough to get the data updated at the right time all the time.
The possibility to share workflows with users, that not need an Alteryx License, is another way to make the data flow better inside the organization.
4. Important to understand where the data is coming from (Source systems)
Understanding what data you are importing, and can import, to Alteryx affects a lot of your work, and especially the outcome of the projects that you work with.
If you ever have worked with other languages that query databases, such as SQL, this one might be obvious, but as it is such a big part of working with Alteryx, it is definitely worth a mention here.
I will go through in two ways here why it is very important to have good knowledge of the back end system, as well as good communication with the people handling the system.
1. Be able to work with the data in the best possible way
A very common use case of Alteryx is to import data and then join together different data sources on the right level of aggregation.
To be able to do this, it is necessary to understand how the different data sources are working together to able to bring a common output of them.
If you understand the different keys and aggregation of the back end system the workflow creation will be much less error prone and oftentimes lead to a quicker creation of the same as well.
2. Get the right data into the system from the beginning (With the right access)
A lot of times when working with new projects, you have to check which data that are available in the earlier stages of the project.
By understanding, and having good communication with the people that are handling the source systems, you will quicker get this data into Alteryx.
The second part of this is that by understanding the source systems better, you will also understand how you can access new data in the future, and bring in more possibilities into Alteryx.
3. Understand which new projects that are possible
This is not completely Alteryx-related, but by understanding the source systems you are better understanding what new projects that are available.
This will help you to get a more throughout answer when you are getting requests from the business regarding different new projects to start up.
5. Tool containers are an integral part of building up data flows
Tool containers are something I rarely came across before I began working professionally with Alteryx, nowadays they are a part of every workflow I build, and I will tell you why!
1. Use containers to keep an output tool connected without sending data
First, put the Output tool(s) in a tool container.
Disable the tool container.
Run the workflow as normal.
No data will be sent to the Output tool, but you can still run the workflow as normal.
When you want to send data through the Output tool you can just enable the tool container again.
2. Use containers to keep a better organized workflow (“Documentation”)
Sometimes, when you have a very big workflow, it can become very messy.
Maybe you know how everything is connected, but as soon as someone else have to go through the workflow they will have a difficult time to understand how everything is connected.
Tool containers in one way to keep up the structure in the workflow in a nicer way.
By including similar parts of the workflow in their own containers, might even include different colors and names of the containers, it becomes much easier to differentiate between different parts of the workflow.
3. Use containers to disable parts of the workflow
If you have big workflows that you work with, you might want to disable some parts of the workflow, while running other parts that you want to test.
If you use tool containers, you can easy chose which parts of the workflow that you want to run.
This is closely related to the previous tip of building up the structure of the workflow with tool containers.
If you have built up the structure of the workflow in a thoughtful way, it will become easy to disable parts of the workflow with Tool containers as well.
Conclusion
Here are the 5 best lessons that I have learned from working with Alteryx professionally as a Data Analyst.
1. The Alteryx Community is amazing
I would really recommend to become invested in the Alteryx Community.
Some great initiatives to be a part of are:
Weekly Challenges — Solve problems and learn about the tool packages in Alteryx
Alteryx Designer Discussions — Great way to get help and learn other users.
2. Cache data makes your User Experience much better
By caching the data when you import it, you will have a much better experience working with workflows, as well as having the possibility to work with more data without stressing the original source.
3. There are much more to Alteryx than just workflow creation
Some of the other great thing you can do in Alteryx when not creating workflows are:
- Scheduling in Alteryx Server: Setting up a daily refresh of workflows.
- Alteryx Apps: Create Apps so people can run with different configurations and get different output back.
- Workflow Sharing: Let people run the workflows themselves if they want them updated in specific, non-scheduled times.
4. It is important to understand where the data is coming from
By understanding where the data is coming from you will:
- Be able to work with the data in the best possible way.
- Get the right data into the system from the beginning.
- Understand which new projects that are possible.
5. Tool containers are an integral part of building up data flows
Some use cases of Tool containers are
- Use containers to keep an output tool connected without sending data
- Use containers to keep a better organized workflow
- Use containers to disable parts of the workflow
Thank you for reading
Thank you very much for reading my blog!
Drop a comment below if you liked the content, and I would love to hear which lessons you have learned from working with Alteryx.
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Questions or inquiries
If you have any questions or input please contact me on
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/elias-nordlinder
Email: Elias.Nordlinder@gmail.com
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Have a great week everyone
//Elias
