In December, Tableau Zen Master Joe Mako of Rosenblatt Securities presented how he leverages data analytics in Alteryx with Tableau in the financial and securities industry. Joe showed examples of the visualizations they create at Rosenblatt to perform advanced analytics. He creates these analytics models by putting data through Alteryx for assembling, data blending and then cleansing. He then launches the resulting dataset directly into Tableau for visual analytics.
Joe uses Alteryx for reshaping data for viewing in Tableau. In Joe's words, "The most useful case for Alteryx is when the data structure is not able to support the interaction I want in Tableau."
In the course of the webinar, Joe shared some thoughts in key areas where he sees the benefits of using Alteryx with Tableau are:
- Speed of gathering, data blending, and cleansing data – "Clean data in Tableau or any other software is essential for easy and effective analysis. It takes less time to create Tableau data engine files in Alteryx."
- Maintenance – "Why use Alteryx? Maintainability and documentation. In Alteryx you'll clearly see an issue. In Excel, good luck finding the error throughout a million cells."
- Ease of use – "ETL tools have a technical knowledge that is required to use them. ETL on the fly for business users - Alteryx fills that gap."
Beyond doing cleansing and data blending, Joe loves Alteryx because it is data driven. One of his examples involves connecting an Alteryx macro to a list of ticker symbols, and Alteryx automatically pulls the data for each symbol and blends the results for viewing in Tableau.
Joe also showed a great demonstration around survey data. As Joe put it, "Previously we used brute force manual work to get survey data into Tableau. Alteryx and Tableau let you flow with your data instead of fighting with it." Joe shows how with a simple transform tool in Alteryx, survey data can be put into the right format for display in Tableau. Joe also chooses Alteryx to handle advanced analytics with complex survey data, "The data can start in multiple files or different structures, and Alteryx reshapes the data to enable easier exploration in Tableau. Then when there is new data in the similar format, all it takes is a click to run the new data through the process."
To sum it up, Joe says, "Tableau only goes so far. When you need advanced joining and manipulation, that's when Alteryx becomes useful. I want to program less. Let the computer do the stuff it's good at. I want to do what I'm good at: being creative. Enable the cycle of visual analytics with Tableau and Alteryx together."
(Thanks to our partners at InterWorks for live tweeting the event – you can find it on the tweetstream #AlteryxLive).
You can hear a recording of the webinar and download the slides. There are also several two-minute demos showing how Alteryx can be used with Tableau located on the Alteryx website: alteryx.com/tableau.
