Alteryx / Tableau Synergy

[mvtthewcornelison]

Hi Alteryx Community,

I know this is a very basic question but I have heard a lot about how Alteryx and Tableau go hand and hand. These are the two tools our firm is heavily pushing at the moment. From my understanding, the reason that these tools go hand and hand is because Alteryx is a data preparation, manipulation, and querying tool that can easily get data in a desired format and output it to a easily readable tableau format (.twbx file).

Am I completely missing something or is this where the power lies? I have heard from some colleagues that it may be possible to create the visualisations within Alteryx? Is this true? What are some use cases for when you have used both the tools simultaneously? Can you also point me in the direction where I can find more about how these tools integrate together? 

I know I am asking a lot but I greatly appreciate any response. Thanks in advance (: 

Matthew

[BenMoss · Accepted solution]

Hi @mvtthewcornelison, as an Alteryx and Tableau consultant I can give you thousands of usecases around this, but let me not bore you with that.

Alteryx and Tableau do work extremely well together, and the primary reason for that is for those that you have mentioned, Alteryx is an extremely good tool for data prepreation, manipulation, and enriching your data. It's also fantastic and advanced anlytics.

Tableau is an extremely powerful visual analytics tool, and both Alteryx and Tableau have a similar motto. They want to make peoples lifes easier, by creating tools which you can iterate extremely quickly with through a drag and drop interface.

Now, recently both Tableau and Alteryx have started to eat into each others space, though they had always dabbled. Tableau have recently launched Tableau Prep, but there are significant shortcomings in that which means it's not quite ready to compete with Tableau. 

Meanwhile, Alteryx are completely revamping their reporting tools (so yes you can build visualisations in Alteryx), and this change process has started in the most recent versions, but significant improvements are always coming.

Alteryx also outputs .hyper and .tde files, those file types which Tableau works fastest with. Another reason they are seen to collaborate well is because Alteryx have created a macro, the 'publish to Tableau Server' macro, which allows you to publish a datasource directly to Tableau server. Meaning someone can build a tableau dashboard, and Alteryx can prepare and transform the data, on a refresh schedule, without any manual intervention.

I myself have also published a few Alteryx tools designed to make the lives of tableau users easier. For example the publish tableau workbook to server, and also a macro that helps create colour palettes for Tableau from images.

I hope this has given you some detail on how the two tools can be leveraged together, but please if you have more specific questions please reach out!

I must say, I feel like the reporting capabilities within Alteryx are extremely under utilised, because they can be a fantastic resource for batch reporting, but Tableau's visualisations are significantly more eye catching!

Ben

[mvtthewcornelison]

@BenMoss, 

Really appreciate your input! Your job as an Alteryx and Tableau consultant sounds quite intriguing. I would love to hear more about your job off this post. I myself do similar consulting but not as specialized in domains as yourself.

You had mentioned:

"Alteryx also outputs .hyper and .tde files, those file types which Tableau works fastest with. Another reason they are seen to collaborate well is because Alteryx have created a macro, the 'publish to Tableau Server' macro, which allows you to publish a datasource directly to Tableau server. Meaning someone can build a tableau dashboard, and Alteryx can prepare and transform the data, on a refresh schedule, without any manual intervention" 

So cool! I am definitely going to start playing around with this and exploring more. As you said, reporting capabilities on Alteryx seems very unitilized but yet so powerful. Alteryx is such a robust product and I am still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of knowledge and depth. As my next steps, I am going to explore Alteryx and Tableau macro tools you mentioned as well as other statistical tools to give further insights to clients.

Again, really appreciate your detailed response-  this is exactly what I was looking for!

Cheers,

Matthew