How to ace alteryx designer?

Question

Hello. I was introduced to Alteryx by my emerging technologies in accounting class. I am amazed by how Alteryx can clean and wrangle data ready for use without the need for coding knowledge. What is the most effective way to study for the Alteryx Core Certification exam and ace the Alteryx designer? Thank you so much in advance.

JagdeeshN · Accepted Answer

Hi @wwt250991 ,

Welcome to the community.

You can start by going through the videos/lessons on the Alteryx Academy  The best way to learn and enjoy Alteryx is to learn while you develop.

Considering you are a student, check out SparkED.

This would give you information regarding educational licensing.

Also you will be surprised at the number of pre-developed solutions available on the community contributed by the members. I would strongly suggest checking those out and reach out out in discussion if you have any questions.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Jagdeesh

JagdeeshN · Accepted Answer

@wwt250991

Also check this response by @MarqueeCrew   for a learning plan/track.
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/General-Discussions/New-Joinerin-Alteryx/m-p/912284/highlight/true...

Happy learning!

TheOC · Accepted Answer

hey @wwt250991

The core exam has a prep guide which i found very useful: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ayx.policies/Core+Certification+Exam+Prep+Guide.pdf

If you need any more help with working towards this, feel free to shoot me a private message!

Be sure to have a look around the community - its really a fantastic place for learning. A couple of resources I would especially recommend knowing about are:

* Alteryx Designer Discussions - A place where users can ask questions about specific Designer workflows they are working on, and receive help from members on the community. Typical response time (from what I've seen) is under 10 minutes for someone to reply with a potential solution, so its a very quick resource for bespoke information. Additionally, you can search using the search function at the top right for specific issues if you happen to run into any that may have been faced by other users before.
* Alteryx User Groups - When I first got into Alteryx, I didn't join User Groups as I thought they would be very technical and that I would need plenty of experience before diving in. However, they really aren't. User groups are an incredibly friendly environment to discuss workflows, what's going on in the Alteryx World, and a great place to network with people in the community. Even better, with the world still being very much virtual at the moment, most of the User Groups (including the North East UK User Group, which I am currently a leader of) are hosting virtual events so they are easy to join.
* The Alteryx Academy - Easily the best place to learn about Alteryx and how to use it. I would especially recommend the learning paths which include short snippets of learning specific topics, including Alteryx for Excel users, which helped me translate a lot of my Excel knowledge over to Alteryx. There are also the weekly challenges, which are challenges delivered by Alteryx on a weekly basis, based around real-life situations and community submitted problems. They are a fantastic way to learn practical uses of Designer, and also its really interesting to see the many different approaches to answering the same problem. Once you have progressed with learning Alteryx, I would definitely recommend the Alteryx Certifications. They are free to do (Core and Advanced), and provide a useful benchmark for your knowledge. You can also just take them again in 7 days, in the case that you don't pass, so don't feel any pressure to know everything before you give them a go!

I hope you find Alteryx to be easy to learn, and intuitive to use. Do remember that almost every tool has an example workflow and help documentation if you right click the tool in the tool palette:

("Help" for the tool documentation, "Open Example" for the example workflow).

And be sure to search for/ask for help on the community if you get stuck. Alternatively, feel free to drop me a message here on the community!

Cheers,
TheOC

grossal · Accepted Answer

Hi @wwt250991,

welcome to the community! I'd also like to share my thoughts on this even though a couple others have already replied to you.

Alteryx provides a lot of resources to learn and it can be sometimes confusing which way to choose, therefore I'd like to split this into two parts:

- My own Alteryx learning path

- Available resources

I'll post all links in the bottom to make it easier to read.

My own Alteryx learning path

I started with the Interactive lessons and I can highly recommend them to you. You will not master anything with these, but it gives you an amazing what Alteryx is capable of and provides you the knowledge of 'we could do this in Alteryx'. Nowadays I teach Alteryx and I often hear 'I didn't know Alteryx can do this'. Taking a look a the interactive lessons first will prevent you from this. It will also help you to figure out what you need and want to learn.

There are a lot of interactive lessons, I highly recommend the following ones:

- Getting Started

- Alteryx for Excel Users

- Writing Expressions

- Spatial Analytics

- Creating Analytic Apps

- Parsing Data

Afterwards you have a basic understanding what's possible and maybe a bit of 'how you can do it'. Without doing any further learning I simply started my first smaller Alteryx product to really get my hands dirty and learn by doing. You'll quickly learn how to google Alteryx issues and find answers in the community quickly.

After my first project I fall into the hole of 'What should I do?' and started doing a couple weekly challenges but quickly realized that I wanted to solve 'real problems' and started to simply to go the discussions board and look at the questions and try to solve them. Solving the problems of others help you to solve our own problems quickly.

And than ... 2 weeks into my journey I started going for certifications - they are free and we can redo them every 7 days. Why shouldn't we try them? These are open book exams and you'll stumble across a lot of topics that you have never heard of, but are able to google quickly. In the end of the exam you'll additionally get an overview of all topics and see what you need to learn more.

That's mainly it. I kept solving community posts for a while, but I quickly felt confident enough to start my first larger work projects.

Resources:

- Interactive Lessons

- Video Index

- Weekly Challenge Index

- Training Webinars

- Learning Path

- Knowledge Blog

- Tool Mastery

If you are a student or a career changer, you might also check out the SparkED program.

Again, welcome to the Alteryx universe!

Best

Alex