Last week I co-presented with TDWI's Fern Halper a webinar, Moving Beyond Spreadsheets for Analytics. The focus was on analytic trends taking form within organizations and in particular the role of the business analysts. These are the people that utilize Microsoft Excel or at least try to utilize it for all of their deep data and analytic needs. My discussion with Fern was about how we can help these folks to do their jobs in a way that would free them from the many hours of painful data blending they are trying to do in Excel.
For Alteryx, it isn’t about replacing Excel. It is about complimenting and augmenting some of the tasks and processes that organizations are relying too much on Excel for. One of such task is data blending or being able to take multiple disparate data sources and blending them together to create a specific set of data that can then be displayed, explored or analyzed in Excel. Analysts struggle with this because many times they’re relying on others within the organization to deliver the dataset they need, or they are trying to tie together multiple documents or sheets to get them to the dataset they need.
Let’s be honest, organizations and analysts will never stop using Excel. It is a great tool, but it also has limitations. I am not just talking about limitations on the size of the data, but limitations on the complexity of tasks that are available in the tool. Excel was not built for heavy data processing, data blending or advanced analytics. This is where Alteryx excels and hits the "sweet spot" for many analysts, including for those who want to deliver their analytic product in form of spreadsheets.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend the webinar, you can catch a replay here. I would also encourage you to download a free trial of Alteryx to see for yourself how Alteryx can help eliminate some of the frustrations analysts have because they are relying on Excel for all of their analytic needs.
