Most often used reporting tool and most useful reporting tool

[wenjuanchen]

Hi everyone, I am learning the Reporting Tools in Alteryx. 

Can anyone let me know:

1. What your most often used reporting tool is, and

2. Which tool you think is the most useful?

Thank you so much.

[BenMoss · Accepted solution]

Table tool is perhaps my most used. The email tool I see as extremely powerful.

I have what I see as a great use case for the reporting tools in Alteryx.

Within our company we encourage our employees to create and share content on Twitter. We also want our employees to share content of their co-workers. As a result it would be ideal if everyone followed everyone else on the different social channels we have.

On a weekly schedule we run a Alteryx workflow that generates, for each person in our company,  a list of people they are not following. We generate a table and then share this table with each employee using the email tool.

Ben

[wenjuanchen]

@BenMoss Wow, that sounds like a wonderful case using Alteryx! Out of curiosity, what do you use to scrape data (who follows whom, who shares whose content, etc) from social networks?

Since you work for the Information Lab, what do you say the difference between Tableau and Alteryx in reporting? Do you see any advantages in Alteryx?

Thank you.

[BenMoss]

We've created a couple of macro's that allow us to achieve the lists, 'Get Twitter Followers' and 'Get Twitter Friends (friends because this is how the API calls them). 

https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/Get-Twitter-Followers/5a44b8dceffc2a0f5896548f

https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/Get-Twitter-Friends/5a44d5d5effc2a0f589656a5

I think there are usecases for sure. Those instances where clients just want to create there Tableau in Excel style we may push back and say, lets do your data prep in Alteryx, but lets not shoehorn everything into Tableau and we can use Alteryx to generate your excel file. 

Ultimately the biggest advantage is mass reporting in my opinion; and a lot of people still prefer an excel or PDF over Tableau so we have to cater for all different audience types.

Hope this helps :)

[wenjuanchen]

@BenMoss The Macro is brilliant! Thanks for sharing. It is really helpful.