Before I officially start, please allow me this brief time to reflect on some lessons I learnt in day one that carried over into day two. Convo has already come in super clutch. I have learnt many great tips, been linked to interesting and useful groups and been introduced to the new DS members from all around the world. I would also like to take advantage of the weekly Alteryx challenges but logging in and actually getting my hands on a challenge has proven rather, well, challenging. You may see me talking about that in future posts.
Today was a more technical day, and so requires a more technical tone. We went through as much of Alteryx Fundamentals Day 1 as we could, only reaching lesson 4 out of 7 because of our sustained stream of inquisitive questions. Below are some tools I jotted down in an excited scribble in my notebook as enjoyable or interesting.
- Copying a selection of a dataset and pasting straight into the workflow to create a new text input
- The ‘Open Example’ functionality on each tool
- Checking the ‘Take File/Table Name From Field’ box to create outputs per the field selected
- And I have written in my notebook ‘joins! I like joins’. I guess joins had a very deep effect on me.
It makes sense that the intuitive nature of these tools, is probably the reason Alteryx is highly marketable. It has the user in mind; it’s made to be used by all levels of data nerd.
One thing I didn't fully understand, is why turning a tool into a macro would be useful. Robbin, our coach and father of a cat named Bob or Pablo, did suggest this will become clearer in time and as we use these tools more. I vaguely understand it as being a way to better capture a long workflow that will likely be repeated for a project or client.
One question I still have from today (possibly something for Convo), is how to remove embedded lines (what I know as \n in my limited coding knowledge) in a variable. For background, some of us came across some problems in lesson 3 on blending data. Alteryx complained that it expected a closed quote string but found embedded lines. This could lead to an interesting solution. I imagine troubleshooting and finding out what’s wrong with datasets will be a sizable part of our data career.
TLDR: DS32 learnt some Alteryx tools and became more familiar with the user interface. Alteryx is user friendly and can be picked up easily by someone with little/no coding experience.