So today was DS35's first run at using Alteryx. What can I say the day started with the apprehension and expectation of being thrown in the deep end and being expected to swim or inevitably sink into the vast depths of unorganized data.
However, I was positively surprised at the pace of the teaching and the amount of information I was ultimately able to take in.
So where to begin, in order to gain an understanding of some of the essential tools of Alteryx we took to analyzing some sales data.
As you can see above we were able to organize sales data by the sales area, SKU and store ID.
Some of the tools needed to organize this data included the formula, select and multi - row formula tools where you can see we used the formula:
IF ISNULL ([week]) THEN [Row-1:week] ELSE [week] ENDIF
in order to fill out the weeks columns with the correct values. This 'code' essentially translates to if the weeks cell is null look at the cell above and fill with this value if not leave as is.
We also organized some data by the unit cost and unit price, this let us use a parsing tool as well as the dynamic renaming tool. Truth be told at this stage I was only really paying attention to how to use each individual tool and was not paying attention to the 'problem' we were tasked to solve.
This is where the topic of this blog comes into play: Pay attention to the Bigger Picture. Because once we were able to combine both of these tables together using the join tool I was able to see the actual benefit of the work that we were doing.
Having combined both the 'sales' table with the 'stock' table the resulting tables from the joining tool was able to tell us which of the stock had been sold and which stock had yet to be moved by the store.
It was at this point I realized just how useful Alteryx can be in order to solve all sorts of different problems and how the resulting analysis can be of use to various clients.
Anyway that was Day 1 of Alteryx for me, hopefully my ramblings have been of some use if not at least I can look back on this blog 4 months on and have a chuckle at how little I knew.