Alteryx Academy

  Hi Maveryx,   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.   Are you enjoying the new Weekly Challenge page? We hope you've had a chance to read our blog post explaining the exciting new features we've introduced in this latest version. We'd love to hear your thoughts, so please leave us a comment with your feedback!   This week's challenge, created by Motoi Tokimatsu, will test your RegEx skills! Thank you, @Tokimatsu , for presenting this intriguing task.   Have you heard about the 850 words of Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English? (In this context, the acronym BASIC stands for British American Scientific International Commercial.) In his book published in 1930, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, he created a list of about 850 words to form the core vocabulary of Basic English. Basic English aims to create an easier and more efficient form of English for international communication, particularly for those learning English as a second language. The reduced vocabulary is designed to cover most everyday situations and needs without the complexity of the full English language.   Your tasks for this challenge include: Download the data from the URL provided. List the words (around 850) Create an index with the first letter of each word. Calculate the number of words that start with each letter of the alphabet.   In this challenge, the Replace and Tokenize functions in RegEx will be your best friends.   Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up: Replacing Data with RegEx Splitting Data with RegEx   Good luck!   ... View more

Hello Community Members,   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.    This week’s challenge is all about an Era... of Costumes!   Unless you avoid listening to all popular music, you have likely heard of the musician Taylor Swift and her sensational world tour: The Eras Tour. This challenge celebrates the final concert of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking tour, which took place yesterday in Vancouver, Canada.   For those unfamiliar, The Eras Tour is a 3.5-hour concert featuring music from different eras (albums) of Taylor’s career. She performs 44 songs, divided into 9 acts, and changes costumes multiple times throughout the show.   Some of the featured acts are Lover, Fearless, Folklore, Speak Now, Red, Reputation, 1989, and Midnights. Each act comes with several costume options! The combinations of these costumes vary across the 149 shows represented in the provided Eras Challenge.xlsx dataset and dataset with images and URLs of the costumes worn (Costume_catalog.yxdb).   Your tasks for this challenge:   Identify which costume combination Taylor wore more than once, covering all nine acts. Create a costume catalog with images for the list generated in Task 1.   Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up: Changing Data Layouts Creating a Layout Adding Text   Happy solving!   Data Source: Taylor Swift Style Blog https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1caBoaDi1id6k4s1sP1bTbo846inOXzN13p0C5OrFY2E/edit#gid=393964062   Image Source: https://taylorswiftstyle.com https://pagesix.com   The Academy Team ... View more

A solution to last week's Challenge has been posted HERE!   This week’s Challenge is a bit different from the norm.  This week, you’ll pick your own Challenge!   We’ve gathered a week’s worth of Twitter data using 10 different hashtags that relate to the most recent meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.  This meeting brought world leaders and diplomats together to discuss a variety of humanitarian concerns which, as you can imagine, generated engagement across social media networks like Twitter.  For this challenge, we collected the most recent data on #hashtags related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.   We’re curious to see what kinds of insights you, the Alteryx Community, derive from the datasets.  Is your Challenge simply to cleanse and organize the data?  Awesome!  Is your Challenge to apply your knowledge of social media analysis to this dataset?  Great!  Is your Challenge to create an app to allow an end user to pull the relevant tweets by date or keyword?  That’s fantastic!  We’re excited to see how you Challenge yourself this week.    As a heads up: this week’s Challenge is only the beginning of our data mining adventure!  This week, your Challenge is to prepare your data in any way, shape or form for next week’s Challenge: visualizing the data in a platform of your choice (Tableau, Alteryx, Plotly, GIF, etc).  We look forward to seeing your data manipulation prowess on display this week, and your creative ways to visualize data the next week!      When you're ready, share your unique "solution" by posting your workflow and describing what your next steps will be for visually displaying your findings.            ... View more

We hope you enjoyed last week's challenge. The solution has been posted here. For the second challenge lets look at removing characters and splitting data into columns based on delimiters.   Many products will export textual data with delimiters such as quotes. This is done so that strings can contain delimiters or control characters within them. Having more than one type of delimiter can be hard for ETL programs to interpret.  In the input text file, there are two different delimiters (double quotes, single quotes) and they surround different data types.   Use Alteryx to strip out the delimiters as superfluous and format the data as represented in the output.   You may notice that we have started classifying the exercises into beginner, Intermediate and advanced.  This classification is used by Alteryx internally to sequence exercises as users advance.    Update 11/23/2015: The solution has been uploaded. ... View more

Here at Alteryx we know the importance of growing our experience at solving data and business problems. Almost weekly (~40+ times a year) we share an Alteryx challenge with our internal Alteryx users and then we all develop our own solutions.  Later we review our solutions in small groups.  Since many Alteryx users have expressed an interest in having us share these exercises, we have created this new section of the Community. The intent is to share and exercise about once a week on Monday. Some of the exercises will be easy and some you will find more challenging.  The goal is to expose everyone to more of the things Alteryx can do and hopefully everyone will take away an idea or two on how to approach different challenges.  The following week we will post a new challenge as well as an example solution to the previous week's challenge.  We hope you enjoy the exercises. Exercise #1 Join to Range: A company in Australia has source data which is made up of a series of postal codes (eg. 2000, 2001, 2002 etc.) amongst some other data fields. They have a separate reference table which contains postcode ranges (eg. 2000 to 2002) which they would like to use to match/filter their main data. Each Customer Record needs to be joined to the Lookup table based on a Postal Area Ranged region. Then finally summarize the customer data by Region, Sales Rep, and Responder, then a count of customers.   Check and see what the result should look like by looking at the data labeled 'Output'.  Your mission is to take the input files and blend them so your result matches the output shown.  Good luck!   UPDATE 11/16/2015: I have posted a solution to challenge #1 from last week.  It is a good example to show the usefulness of the generate rows tool.  Please keep in mind that this is just one solution using Alteryx to solve the problem, there can be many other solutions and approaches to the problem.  Hopefully you had fun and learned something new in the process. ... View more