Analytics
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The release of Alteryx Analytics 9.5 brings many exciting new features to our users, including the ability to further empower data analysts by reading from and writing to various data sources. Of course, not all of these data sources see equal amounts of usage. In a customer survey last fall, over half of our customers reported Excel as one of the sources of data they require for data blending.
Like most analytics tools out there, our support for reading and writing Excel files was through a Microsoft driver (read related blog post). While the Microsoft driver is still available, with Release 9.5 we have released native read and write support for the Microsoft Excel file format (xlsx). Our beta testers have been impressed by the speed of the new driver.
"Love it because it's outstandingly super fast and is really the only viable way of dealing with 8 x 400mb spreadsheets with 850k+ rows in each."
– Alteryx customer
"Performance was stellar : 330mb file in 30 secs versus 8 minutes."
– Alteryx customer
With the new Excel driver, users can expect to see up to 10x performance improvements for large spreadsheets. This driver also removes the need to install the Access Data Engine, further reducing a data analyst's dependency on IT.
For a full side-by-side comparison, please visit this page. Users can submit feedback on reading from and writing to Excel, as well as request new features, by posting on the Alteryx Community.
If you would like to learn more about the features in Alteryx Analytics 9.5, please attend the Alteryx Analytics 9.5 launch webinar on January 29th. You can also check out the What's New page or download a 14-day trial and starting accelerating analytic insight yourself.
