Overview This two-day instructor-led course is designed to give students a hands-on introduction to Alteryx Designer, an all-in-one self-service Business Intelligence solution for acquiring, transforming, visualizing and interacting with data.
Description
This two-day instructor-led course is designed to give students a hands-on introduction to Alteryx Designer, an all-in-one self-service Business Intelligence solution for acquiring, transforming, visualizing and interacting with data. The course doesn’t assume any previous experience with Alteryx or any other Business Intelligence technology. By the end of the course, students will have had the opportunity to work with Alteryx designer and will have learned the fundamentals of using it to analyze business data through a series of lab exercises using several different sample datasets.
Prerequisites
The primary prerequisite for this course is simply that students should be familiar with the data they want to analyze and have some sense of the kinds of analysis they want to do. Beyond that, students should have basic computer skills and knowledge of getting around in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Some familiarity with Microsoft Excel is helpful but by no means necessary.
Course Outline
Module 1: Introduction to Alteryx
This module provides the opportunity to get familiar with Alteryx Designer and its functionality. Topics include:
· The Alteryx Analytics Platform
· Alteryx Designer licensing
· Obtaining and installing Alteryx Designer
· A brief tour of Alteryx Designer
Module 2: Basic Operations
This module covers some of the most common and fundamental operations that all analysts will need to perform in Alteryx Designer. Topics include:
· Acquiring data
· Viewing data
· Outputting data
· Annotating your solution
· Filtering and sorting data
· Creating custom calculations
· Combining and summarizing data
· Pivoting and unpivoting
Module 3: Cleaning and Transforming Data
Often, business data will contain errors, non-printable characters, codes that must be replaced or eliminated, and other features that make the data in its original form unsuitable for use in an analytic solution. Module 3 addresses the need to “clean”
data, that is, to remove or alter undesirable elements in preparation for analysis. Topics include:
· Handling nulls
· Multi-field and multi-row formulas
· Creating ad hoc data
· Data cleansing
Module 4: More Transforming Operations
Module 4 continues the discussion from previous modules, addressing more of the tools and techniques that Alteryx Designer provides. Topics include:
· Appending fields
· Automatically setting data types
· Working with date & time values
· Working with directories
Module 5: Combining & Shaping Data
After data has been cleaned, it is often still organized in a way that makes analysis difficult. This module covers some of the techniques an analyst can use to change the “shape” of the data. Topics include:
· Using demographic data
· Find and replace
· Complex joins
· Text to columns
· Random sampling
· Parsing XML
Module 6: Visualizing Data
Once data has been cleaned and organized, it’s time to present it. Module 6 covers some of the primary tools that Alteryx Designer provides for visualizing data.
· Charting
· Working with spatial data
· Working with report layouts
· Adding tables
· Adding images
· Sharing reports through e-mail
Module 7: Advanced Data Manipulation
If the previous techniques don’t work, Alteryx Designer has more sophisticated tools for cleaning, transforming, and shaping data. Topics covered in Module 7 include:
· Fuzzy matching
· Record Ids
· Using regular expressions
· Removing duplicates
Module 8: Creating Forms for User Interaction
Along with the ability to transform, shape, and visualize data, Alteryx Designer also provides the ability to create applications that allow users to interact with the data. Topics covered in this module include:
· Actions
· Conditions
· Control parameters
· Input controls
