Prior to joining the data school I worked as a auditor for a short time and as such used excel quite a lot for my data analysis needs. In this blog I just wanted to highlight some of the tasks I would do day to day and how I would do things differently now that I can use Alteryx.
1) Inputting Data in excel:
As we all know in excel to input data you click File and then click Open then locate the file you need. opening multiple different files can be a pain and each new file would open as a new worksheet.
Inputting Data in Alteryx:
With Alteryx I can just drag and drop a input tool into the canvas which I can then configure for multiple different file types. I can also use wildcard actions to input multiple different files.
2) Using VLOOKUP in excel. VLOOKUP is one of the most popular functions in excel, I would use this quite often to compare values from 2 different tables to check if there were any differences or find values for a particular thing your searching for.
For example if I use a sample data set:
You can see what I'm doing here with the VLOOKUP function is matching the pay on the right hand side table with the employee names on the left hand side table. The functions takes into account the value your looking for highlighted in blue, the table your looking for the value in (highlighted in red) , the column the corresponding value your after is in (in the above example for first name this is column 3 in the left table) and FALSE specifies that you want an exact match.
While this function is extremely useful it does have its limitations in that it can only find values to the right, finds only the first match and cannot look at multiple columns altogether.
In contrast to this if I wanted to do the same thing in Alteryx all I would need is one join tool:
You can see on the above screenshot I've configured it to match the employee id to the employee id on the other table. You can see the resulting table in the results pane. If I wanted to take this further I could configure the table some more with a formula tool to concatenate the first and last name into one column.
These are the first couple of differences that immediately come to mind, I'm sure I will think of more as I continue to improve my Alteryx skills and ill be sure to post more when i think of them.