New Alteryx User

Question

Hi everyone, I am currently learning about Alteryx in my class, and I had no experience with Alteryx before this. I learned a lot about Alteryx and its uses from the interactive lessons. Those are very helpful! The interactive lessons led me to a better understanding of Alteryx. What are the most useful tools in Alteryx?

TheOC · Answer

hey @YanlingYu

Great to hear you're using Alteryx in your class (I'm very jealous, I wish I had Alteryx in my classes).

The interactive lessons are indeed very useful!

To be honest, I've found almost every tool to be incredibly useful in specific use-cases, I've also found that I've got some of the most use out of tools I have actually created myself. You may have come across this process in the interactive lessons as macros.

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

mceleavey · Answer

Hi @YanlingYu and welcome to the first step of your Alteryx journey!

There are hundreds of tool that do weird and wonderful things. I would recommend starting in the Academy section:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Academy/ct-p/alteryx-academy

Here, you can follow interactive lessons and little bite-sized introductions that will get you up and running with Alteryx.

Enjoy!

M.

sparksun · Answer

Actually every tool is useful when it is used in your workflow.😃