New User

Question

Hi all, I'm a CSUF student, and I'm completely new to Alteryx. Through interactive lessons, I found it so helpful and supportive, especially with my accounting major. I am so excited to learn more about Alterryx and master it. Are there any tips or tricks for Alteryx Excel users?

clmc9601 · Answer

Hi @khanhpham,

Welcome to Alteryx! I also studied accounting and thought I loved Excel before I found Alteryx ">⭐. My biggest advice for learning Alteryx after Excel: you have to switch your mindset about data. Excel is much more flexible (and corruptible) than Alteryx when it comes to data. You're probably accustomed to the ability to change a cell individually at will. In Alteryx, you have to think in terms of columns. Whatever changes you make to "a cell", you have to make to the entire column. Pivot-table-like results are only for the end product in Alteryx. Raw data is retrieved by columns, not by row labels. Instead of a VLookup, use a Join or a Find Replace. You can find many of your favorite Excel functions within Alteryx expression editors such as the Formula tool. Happy solving!

TheOC · Answer

hey @khanhpham

Hope you're enjoying Alteryx so far!

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

cmcclellan · Answer

Check out the Learn menu above - especially the training and the Weekly Challenges