Welcome to the Northampton User Group! Please Introduce Yourself.

[LaurenU]

Hello User Group Members!

Welcome to the Alteryx User Group Comminity for Northampton, UK.

I'm very excited to get this new community running and meeting all the passionate Alteryx users in the area!

Please take a moment by answering the questions below to introduce yourself;

1. What is your name and industry you work in?
2. How do you currently use Alteryx?
3. What areas would you like to grow in?

[Si-Pri]

Hi everyone,

I am Simon from Bristol, which is clearly not in Northampton/Coventry!...my companies head office is in Leamington Spa, so I’m hoping that’s good enough to avoid the boot! For a number of months, I have considered setting up a user group in the South West, but feel I should increase my Alteryx experience first.

This group stood out as a good place to be for a number of reasons:

1 - It contains a colleague of mine (James)

2 – The person who first introduced me to Alteryx and continues to be a friend, is a member (Wasim)

3 – and if I recall correctly, the group’s leader is a member of the Inspire 2018 grand prix pit crew!

I work for Infrastructure, which is the Civil Engineering and utilities wing of Wolseley UK.

To a various level of skill I use Alteryx for the following activities:

• Building and querying independent performance databases [That link SQL, Excel flat files and Business Objects to other external sources]
• Partially-autonomous, complex reporting
• Spatial Analytics
• Preparation of Sales dashboards that apply predictive modelling
• Webscraping
• Mass data blending

We are new to system, so I would like to grow in the area of exploring opportunities and platforms beyond the Alteryx designer.

My next area to tackle will be macros and how I can utilise them, so if anyone has any tips or documentation it would be very much appreciated.

Hoping I can stick around, 

Simon

[Wasim]

Simon,

Good to hear from you buddy. I’d definitely recommend attending the next Northampton user group.

Some great people to learn from especially within Sam’s team over at Sainsbury’s Property Analytics - some of their spatial use cases are mind blowing.

Will try and attend the next user group myself, be good to catchup with you and everyone else.

Wasim

[Samanthaj_hughes]

---

@Si-Pri wrote:

Hi everyone,

I am Simon from Bristol, which is clearly not in Northampton/Coventry!...my companies head office is in Leamington Spa, so I’m hoping that’s good enough to avoid the boot! For a number of months, I have considered setting up a user group in the South West, but feel I should increase my Alteryx experience first.

This group stood out as a good place to be for a number of reasons:

1 - It contains a colleague of mine (James)

2 – The person who first introduced me to Alteryx and continues to be a friend, is a member (Wasim)

3 – and if I recall correctly, the group’s leader is a member of the Inspire 2018 grand prix pit crew!

I work for Infrastructure, which is the Civil Engineering and utilities wing of Wolseley UK.

To a various level of skill I use Alteryx for the following activities:

• Building and querying independent performance databases [That link SQL, Excel flat files and Business Objects to other external sources]
• Partially-autonomous, complex reporting
• Spatial Analytics
• Preparation of Sales dashboards that apply predictive modelling
• Webscraping
• Mass data blending

We are new to system, so I would like to grow in the area of exploring opportunities and platforms beyond the Alteryx designer.

My next area to tackle will be macros and how I can utilise them, so if anyone has any tips or documentation it would be very much appreciated.

Hoping I can stick around, 

Simon

---

Welcome Simon!

I am so pleased we can be accessible for you and no we will not "give you the boot"!! All Alteryx users are welcome here, new or old. 

We do have a meeting coming up which I need to finalise, it will incorporate a download from INSPIRE (and being in the Grand Prix) and perhaps some useful sharing again. I have lots of goodies form the User Group team at Alteryx I can give away.

We can absolutely cover Macros and I would get yourself on the Academy on Alteryx website, they have some fab ways of learning there now, my intern has proven that they do absolutely work because she became CORE certified within 18 days of starting her role. :D I can share our training plan with you if that helps during the User Group.

Also I might see if I can get Nick Jewel or Alteryx to show us some more on the new features. I plan on signing up for the BETA hopefully. So I might also be able to share some great tips on what's coming.

Welcome and keep watching this space for the next Alteryx User Group.

until then happy Alteryxing all!

[Samanthaj_hughes]

---

@Wasim wrote:
Simon,

Good to hear from you buddy. I’d definitely recommend attending the next Northampton user group.

Some great people to learn from especially within Sam’s team over at Sainsbury’s Property Analytics - some of their spatial use cases are mind blowing.

Will try and attend the next user group myself, be good to catchup with you and everyone else.

Wasim

---

Thanks Wasim!

I might ask Tim to come and talk about the Regions in a more in-depth look if you all fancy it?

For those who didn't attend INSPIRE this year, Tim has built an automated way to build Regions within Alteryx, and sub regions when locations are provided with a Region column pre-populated. Using the spatial tools and the Map Input tool he can automate a process which took 2 weeks per iteration into seconds...! :O

<MIND BLOWN>

Star here if that is something you would all like to see!

S*

[LaurenU]

Thanks for being so welcoming @Samanthaj_hughes! Looking forward to the next meeting.

@Wasim, thanks for the reminder that you are more in the southwest. I actually have been having a conversation with @S_Summers in Wales. I see @Si-Pri is near Bristol. Would it be of interest to have the 3 of you band together to have a group to support the southwest region? I'm not sure what travel times are like and if people are willing to travel to each different city. It will be a small risk and I'm not sure what the return will look like.

Sorry, Samantha for potentially stealing people, but this opportunity might be a good thing. :)

[Samanthaj_hughes]

---

@gradyjofficial wrote:

@Samanthaj_hughes

Is there a user group meet up planned soon?

Regards,

James

---

Hi James.

Yes there is one coming up next month!

Provisionally its in my diary on the 16th November 2018. I hope to finalise a few things and then I will share. 

S*

[Samanthaj_hughes]

---

@LaurenU wrote:

Thanks for being so welcoming @Samanthaj_hughes! Looking forward to the next meeting.

@Wasim, thanks for the reminder that you are more in the southwest. I actually have been having a conversation with @S_Summers in Wales. I see @Si-Pri is near Bristol. Would it be of interest to have the 3 of you band together to have a group to support the southwest region? I'm not sure what travel times are like and if people are willing to travel to each different city. It will be a small risk and I'm not sure what the return will look like.

Sorry, Samantha for potentially stealing people, but this opportunity might be a good thing. :)

---

That you are Lauren!  :O

I don't mind them coming along and then setting up on their own. It's great to understand what is required to set one up and content, etc.

Everyone is welcome!

S*

[Si-Pri]

Thank you, I look forward to it.

The training plan would be brilliant too, I feel like i'm good a narrow range of tools but not yet broad enough to take the core exam, so any help there would be awesome!

[Si-Pri]

Hi Lauren,

As Samantha says, I'd be interested in participating in both groups.

I can host small events in Bristol or travel as required so if you think it's a good idea you can count me in.

Simon

[reyres]

Hi,

I'm Richard and I've been using Alteryx for about 2 months now. I work for Coventry University in the Strategic Planning and Analytics Office where we are responsible for statutory returns, dashboarding, student number planning and course portfolio advice.

Our driver for introducing Alteryx was to help us run our student number planning process where we look at how many students are enrolled in the current year, apply progression rates and try to predict how many students we will have next year. The numbers are then used for planning and budgeting across the University. The process has previously been run using Excel spreadsheets which is very labour intensive and so we were looking for a more effective tool! For this round of student number planning I am using Alteryx for data processing then Excel for the outputs and distribution to interested parties although we also use Tableau and I will be looking at using Tableau for data visualisation in the future. Alteryx has been a fantastic tool and has already given us time savings on the process allowing more time in the future for bringing in contextual data to help us improve our projections. At present, I am the only person in the University who is using Aleryx and we only have one license but there are plenty of processes that could be improved with the use of Alteryx so I’m sure we will be expanding the pool of Alteryx users!

As I am very new to Alteryx I would like to learn more about pretty much every area really but I would particularly like to learn more about the analytics tools and web-scraping.

I’m looking forward to meeting some more experienced users of Alteryx at the user group meetings!