I finally got to use Alteryx for the first time as part of the Dataschool this week! It was very exciting to learn about another data cleaning tool. After many data prep challenges done on tableau prep, I feel comfortable with more advanced challenges.
This has led me to help some tableau users via the tableau forum, answering questions about tableau prep. One of the questions made me realise that Tableau prep does not always do well with Larger datasets, to the point where the workflow of the user could not provide an output.
This is where alteryx comes in. It was very easy to pick up Alteryx thanks to the similar layout of the workflow, working in step and the ability to go back to previous steps. I found it much easier to use than PowerQuery due to that reason. Moreover, having all the different types of tools you can use on the tab at the top of the screen really helped me organise my thoughts and plan out how I wanted to clean the data.
My main struggle in data prep challenges on Alteryx was the use of dates. Somehow dates which were recognised in tableau prep instantly, required formatting to get the data parts (years, months, day) in the right order.
Other than that, I also enjoyed the different options in terms of creating inputs and outputs. Being able to create an input just from text seems like such a small step which could help solver a few problems. What helped me go quicker was the ability to copy and paste different steps from Alteryx. For example if in one part of my flow I needed a filter, I could copy that filter to use on another part of the flow which required similar filtering.
Overall, I think Alteryx will become my favoured data prep tool, it will take time and I will write blogs about any major functionality.