Thanks to everyone that attended our Q4 Boston Alteryx UG!
Here is a recap of the event:
6:10 – 6:40 | Brian Moore : Leveraging Alteryx to clean & augment U.S. brewery data
Brian is a Senior Analyst at Bentley University whose passion is everything data. He reiterated his passion with taking the audience down his journey of submitting his Alteryx workflow into the Tableau's Chart Champ competition.
- Brian’s presentation focused on Brewery data & utilizing Google’s Places API in order to build a workflow to be used in his Brewery Tour Tableau dashboard. One of the issues that Brian ran into when leveraging the API was that location bias is something that must be accounted for. After adjusting for this parameter, he was able to get the intended results for U.S. based brewery locations. Not having any prior coding background, Brian noted how simple and easy it was to work with the API in Alteryx. He also stressed the importance of breaking ones workflow into multiple parts which in his case was beneficial as Google charges for each API call.
I encourage everyone to check out Brian’s process within the attached deck. He even included a video link of his final dashboard!
6:40 – 6:55 | Joshua Marsh : Community Post
I wanted to address a post within the community by @joe_de_foleschampe that addressed leveraging Public sector APIs in order to do Time Series indexing.
- For my presentation, I wanted to explore how one could pull data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to compare two different geographies. Using the BLS’s API, I pulled in Unemployment data for the United States & Massachusetts. One of the issues that you often face with data such as this is that it may be of a different order of magnitude. Another way to say this is that the data are not apples to apples and with indexing, you achieve a similar scale. I used Alteryx to not only pull in my external data set but to also index the data. I then visualized the output in Tableau to help analyze the data and draw some conclusions.
The workflow and visualization are attached for you to explore!
6:55 – 7:25 | William Cogswell : Iterative Macros
Will comes to us from Staples Inc., where he is a Senior Analyst in Pricing. In his daily job, Will interacts with Sales teams who require reporting applicable to their cohort. Will demonstrated how he uses Alteryx to automate not only the reporting but the emails that get sent using iterative macros.
- Will’s presentation was a live demo of how one would create an iterative macro using Tableau Super Store data (Which is very applicable to Staples!). As Will dragged and dropped tools onto the canvas he painted a picture of how iterative macros work and their understanding/ function. Will advised to pair the name of your macro inputs/outputs to something that resonates with the task (i.e. I for Iteration, R for Results). One hiccup that the presentation faced was an error that all fields be mapped for input. As the audience engaged in helping to troubleshoot the issue, Will discovered that two fields were similarly named. After overcoming the issue the workflow worked as intended, giving a report of sales by region.
I encourage everyone to check out Will’s macro (attached) and look for ways to apply this to your daily duties.
