Book Image

Learning Alteryx

By : Renato Baruti
Book Image

Learning Alteryx

By: Renato Baruti

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 (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Converting strings to dates and dates to strings


There are a variety of date formats that need to be updated to a data type that meets the needs of the analysis. A string formatted date may need to be updated to a date/time format. On the other hand, a date/time format may need to be updated to a string format. The complexity of updating this can be quite cumbersome and there are formulas available to make these necessary updates. Better yet, there is a DateTime tool in Alteryx that includes options on selecting the format to convert.

The following image shows the DateTime tool located in the Parse tool palette.

The DateTime tool can convert a date/time format to string and vice versa, a string to a date/time format. The flexibility of the format selections is quite helpfully located in just one tool! It contains prestored formats and an option to specify a custom format. Let's go through a few examples using the DateTime tool and looking at how it may benefit you to make the format updates...