Book Image

Learning Alteryx

Book Image

Learning Alteryx

Overview of this book

Alteryx, as a leading data blending and advanced data analytics platform, has taken self-service data analytics to the next level. Companies worldwide often find themselves struggling to prepare and blend massive datasets that are time-consuming for analysts. Alteryx solves these problems with a repeatable workflow designed to quickly clean, prepare, blend, and join your data in a seamless manner. This book will set you on a self-service data analytics journey that will help you create efficient workflows using Alteryx, without any coding involved. It will empower you and your organization to take well-informed decisions with the help of deeper business insights from the data.Starting with the fundamentals of using Alteryx such as data preparation and blending, you will delve into the more advanced concepts such as performing predictive analytics. You will also learn how to use Alteryx’s features to share the insights gained with the relevant decision makers. To ensure consistency, we will be using data from the Healthcare domain throughout this book. The knowledge you gain from this book will guide you to solve real-life problems related to Business Intelligence confidently. Whether you are a novice with Alteryx or an experienced data analyst keen to explore Alteryx’s self-service analytics features, this book will be the perfect companion for you.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Getting Started with Alteryx

Alteryx Analytics is a tremendous platform allowing analysts to easily prep, blend, and analyze all their data using a repeatable workflow. Many business groups, such as marketing, finance, healthcare, and sales find it difficult to quickly analyze data they can act upon instantly using legacy approaches, such as Microsoft Excel and other platforms. Alteryx solves these problems with a seamless process, by using tools to gather, cleanse, and join data from different sources. This repeatable workflow for self-service data analytics delivers deeper insights in hours, not weeks.

You will be accomplishing the task of building and publishing analytic models by using tools in a drag-and-drop environment within the same intuitive user interface. You’ll learn data preparation and data cleansing from spreadsheets and other sources to determine key insights and how share those key insights.

In this chapter, we'll focus on the following foundation topics: 

  • Downloading and installing Alteryx Designer
  • An introduction to Alteryx Designer and what makes it such a powerful self-service analytics platform
  • A look inside the Alteryx Designer architecture and understanding how the Alteryx Engine drives data processing in a repeatable workflow
  • An overview of the workflow configurations, ensuring indispensable selections are met to create an optimal workflow
  • Exploring the tool palettes filled with endless tools within various tool palettes (Getting familiar with the tool palettes will provide quick and easy access to designing your workflow)
  • The Favorites tools to categorize and save most utilized tools