What is Alteryx

Alteryx is an end-to-end data analytics platform that allows users to prep, blend and analyze data in a drag and drop user interface. Drag and drop means that you can directly drag any tool or dataset directly into your workspace.

Now you might be wondering how this differs from programs that you might already be using such as excel and several other spreadsheet programs, well adding data sources to excel requires manual copy paste and repeat tasks, this is also true for data cleansing. Automation of this repetitive work is possible but you have to learn some programming language coding. In alteryx you can add repeatable processes by dragging and dropping tools into your workflow, this workflow can then be automated or scheduled to run on a regular basis which saves a lot of time, excel is also limited to just one million rows so anything greater than that would have to be put into a separate file while in alteryx a large amount of data can be utilized and it has more than 70 different types of needed data connectors or tools as well as an assortment of APIs.

Let’s take a look at the basic structure of the platform  

On the top, you can see the tool palette where all the tools reside and from here you can drag and drop tools to the workflow canvas which is an empty space to create your workflow, on the left-hand side you can see the configuration window which displays the configuration for either a selected tool, a connection or the workflow itself if you do not select anything else below we have the results window it shows us the state of the data as the workflow runs and it displays any messages warnings or errors that can occur, it also gives us links to the output file that is created. To run our workflow we can click on the run button on the upper right portion of the canvas or press control plus R (ctrl+R) on our keyboard or click on the options then run the workflow, this will start the flow to data from the input tools to the tools you have configured on the canvas, an important point to note here is that running a workflow will not change anything on your original file input unless we overwrite it using an output data tool moreover tools won’t do anything to your data unless you configure them first.  

Each tool has a different configuration and if not configured properly it will display a red exclamation mark on the tool icon which is an indicator for us that it needs further action.  In this window the first icon with a screw contains the tool configuration that we have discussed while the next one with the pointed arrow is the navigation which shows us which tools are connected to the selected tool that we have, we can also hide or show their connections by selecting or deselecting the wireless checkbox the tab icon shows us the annotation settings for the tool, here we can name the tool and type annotation or caption of each tool the annotation can also be shown based on canvas setting always show or never show the last icon in the window leads us to the help page of alteryx, it has the complete documentation regarding the selected tool.

Once you are done with the workflow you can save it by navigating to the File menu and variable-length then hitting save your workflow will be saved in your designated file path as a dot yxmd file which saves the whole workflow including the tools used you can also export your workflow by clicking on options then export workflow this will save your file as a yxzp which is an alteryx package that contains your workflow yxmd, as well as any assets, used such as the input files that you have in your workflow this will be useful if you are sharing your work to others in your organization. Now we’re going to dive into the detail of these various areas let’s head on to the different data types that alteryx supports  

Alteryx processes values differently depending on their data type and here are the five main types of data

We check for these data types in alteryx when bringing in data, a lot of users use the select tool to check data type and structure, to add a select tool click on the preparation toolset then click on the select tool and drag it to the canvas a dotted line will show that you can attach it to the nearby input data tool and it will become a straight line once you let go of the tool once done alteryx can now show you the list of available fields from the connected data through this configuration window this shows the data type for each column and its size.

All of this just was just an introduction to alteryx now we can cover tool wise:

Alteryx was recognized as a leader in Gartner’s 2018 magic quadrant for data science and machine learning platforms Gartner specifically recognized alteryx as the leader with the highest ability to execute on its vision alteryx. Alteryx’s easy to use solutions address the needs of a wide range of problem solvers from citizen data scientists to highly trained business analysts, the alteryx platform offers customers both a code-free and code-friendly approach, hundreds of automation building blocks and the ability to integrate with enterprise applications and robotic process automation or rpa to automate machine learning pipelines and business processes.,