What’s your go-to Excel to Alteryx comparison scenario?

Question

Ignorance is Bliss

If you’ve spent any time perusing the community, it’s likely that you’ve come across at least one of the many resources we’ve put together to help Excel users make the transition to Alteryx. The Alteryx for Excel Users series is just one example, where @WayneWooldridge explores the things people use Excel for, using Excel terminology, and how that translates into Alteryx.

From VLOOKUPS to Pivot Tables, Appends, IF Statements, and Cumulative Sum of Rows, I think we can all agree that one of the key advantages of Alteryx is that it can do everything Excel can, but in a repeatable and predictable fashion. For this week's Thursday Thought, let’s take the opportunity to dig into this concept a bit further…

Pretend you have 30 seconds to convince a passionate Excel user to make the switch to Alteryx.

Question:

What’s your go-to Excel to Alteryx comparison scenario?

What’s the ONE thing you would point to, to convince someone they’ve been lost in Excel hell?

MattD · Answer

I should also add that the increasing need for data has increased the size and sources of data stores. Having a tool that has the flexibility to input Excel data with others is a benefit in and of itself, but relying solely on Excel can paralyze an analyst just due to the sheer size of datasets nowadays. The most recent version of Excel can only support up to 1,048,576 rows or 16,384 columns (fields) of data (more Excel resource limitation info available here), with usability quickly falling off due to the performance drain of increasingly large datasets. This tends to force analysts to either use a different storage option and/or to treat the data outside of the Excel spreadsheet itself - both of which Alteryx enables you to do!

MattD · Answer

As a relatively recent Alteryx convert, my favorite feature of the trade-off has got to be the ability to easily incorporate several Excel (or other data stores: flat, database, web, or otherwise) files into a single, holistic, analyses maintained on one canvas. While you can mostly argue preference for which exact methods are easier to treat the data in any individual set (Excel formulas vs our Formula Tool, or Excel reshapes vs our Transform Tools), there is still little flexibility for analysts to collaborate multiple Excel spreadsheets (still a predominate storage option) without specialized tools.

Coming from a mostly programmatic background of python libraries and SQL databases, I'm definitely partial to the speed of Alteryx implementation. But the real value add for me is the ability to drag multiple Excel files onto a canvas, right beside Input Data Tool database connections or Download Tool FTP or web data, to contextualize those Excel files to provide a more thorough analysis. Once they're all in the same "flow," in Alteryx, it makes it far easier to blend and manipulate the data all at once, and provide a singular output that can be more readily formatted and visualized, if need be.