Alteryx Academy

The solution to last week's challenge is HERE.   This week we will be offering our third ever challenge on converting strings to dates. Sometimes these may be simple, but every once in awhile, we come across those source systems that drop things in a format that are better understood by machine than by a human. In this week's challenge, convert the string to a date using the following rules:   1) The Input contains dates formatted as year, month, day where the first character details if the year begins with 19 or 20. 2) It is 19 when the first character is 0 and 20 when the character is 1. 3) The remainder of the date following the 0 or 1 is the remaining year digits followed by month followed by day.   Example: 1040202 should become 2004-02-02.   ... View more

The link to last week’s challenge (challenge #27) is HERE     Use Case:  A company has to process financial data for their visualization tool.  Today this is a manual process in Excel.   Objective:  Build a process in Alteryx that automates the formatting of the daily data feed.   Note: This data comes in daily and is always in the exact same format.     ... View more

The link to last week’s challenge (challenge #26) is HERE This week’s challenge is a spatial use case to preprocess a spatial object for mapping.  The input file is a single complex polygon that represents a coverage area.   Use Case: A wireless telecommunications company wants to remove holes and splatter from their coverage area for simplified map display.   Splatter can be define as unnecessary pieces of the whole polygon.   Objective: Remove all splatter less than 2 square miles and holes from the coverage area.   This exercise can generate varying answers based on the configuration of the spatial tools used for the process. As a result the challenge does not contain an output.    Have fun! ... View more

The link to last week’s challenge ( challenge #25) is HERE   This week’s challenge is a use case faced by one of our customers that can leverage the geo-spatial tools available in Alteryx.  If you have the spatial data available you can output your results as drive-distance, in the event that you do not have the drive-distance data available, please use the straight-line distance.  The basic tools and setup of the data needed will be identical.  Output results will be provided for both methods.  In the event that you use drive-distance and your results vary slightly from the sample output, it may be due to variance in the data set used for the exercise.   Use Case:  in order to audit their employee expense reports, a service company would like to calculate how far (in miles) their technician is traveling from their hotels, to the worksite, then to their destination hotel on a daily basis.   The Data:  The source is collected in a way that record 1 contains the spatial object for the beginning hotel for day 1, record 2 is the spatial object for the worksite for day 1, and record 3 is the spatial object for the ending hotel for day 1.  This pattern repeats for three successive days.   Find the distance on a daily basis the technician is either driving or straight line distance if you don’t have the spatial data available.   Enjoy! ... View more

Wow!  Thanks to everyone who posted their solution to last Week's Challenge here!  It was great to see everyone's creativity and different approaches to solving a problem.  We had some submissions for different locations (and hemispheres!), as well as some tweaks to put a unique analytical spin on the original problem.  We also had some new Challengers!  Woohoo!    This week's Challenge was inspired by a recent conversation I had with an Alteryx user at Inspire in London a few weeks ago.  In this case, he wanted to figure out how many combinations of products he had in a dataset.  We spoke about a few different approaches, and I'm curious to see how the Community responds to this Challenge.  Have you had a use case where you've needed to accomplish something similar?  What other tweaks can you think of that might make this Challenge relevant for other tasks?     The Input dataset contains a list of twenty (20) transactions.  Each transaction contains a list of items that a customer purchased at the market.  How many combinations of the same objects were purchased?  In this case, the order does not matter.  That is, the combination of "carrots, tea, shampoo" is the same as "shampoo, carrots, tea".     ... View more