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Engine Works

Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
apolly
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

At Alteryx, we know you need to see into your data at every step of the way to better understand your data including the ability to effectively communicate those insights you worked so hard to develop.  With our Visualytics you can bring every insight to life so people of all levels in the organization can understand your entire analysis.  With our latest release, 2018.3, you can now try our extended Visualytics features with our Interactive Chart and Insight Tool within the Reporting Suite.  Today, we will focus on the Insight Tool but this Interactive Chart tool post will provide you with helpful hints.

 

What can I do with the Insight Tool?

With the new Insight tool you can build and combine multiple interactive charts so your stakeholders can investigate and focus on what is important to them.  The Insight Tool leverages our new chart capabilities, so you can easily customize your charts, adding a drill down to each so when you drill down into one chart it reflects across all other charts.  The resulting dashboard can then be output to your organization’s Alteryx Gallery to share your insights with everyone. 

 

Create the same popular chart types that are available in the Interactive Chart Tool:

  • Area
  • Bar
  • Box & Whisker
  • Candlestick
  • Heatmap
  • Line
  • Scatter
  • Pie

 

How do I use the Insight Tool?

The Insight Tool is a simple to use feature that lets you build interactive dashboards by combining multiple charts and text together so anyone can understand the full picture of your analysis and drill down on what’s important to them.

 

1.  From the reporting suite of tools, simply drop the Insight tool  insight tool.png into your workflow

 

2.  Configure your Insight by dragging and dropping either a chart or text onto the Insight Tool canvas.  Configure each chart you want to share by choosing the type, add layers, drill downs, and customizing fonts, colors and much more. If you have a preconfigured chart that you saved to your templates, you can import to reuse the same format.  The steps below will build out insights with drilldowns.

 

1.png2.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Add drilldowns that will enable each individual chart to change across the dashboard.

 

3.png

 

 

4.  Add Layer by giving it a name, choosing which type of chart and the data you want to visualize. This includes any drilldown fields you created in the above step which will show up at the bottom of the list.  If you want more than one layer to add dimensions to your charts, simply click add layer within the interactive chart tool.  Please note that you can add different chart types (ex. line and bar graph) 

4.png

 

5.  Within the layer tab, you can also perform some calculations such as sum, count, min, max or mean to your data.

 

5.png

 

 

6.  Ensure your data looks the way you want by using the sort function. For example, on a bar chart you can sort by ascending so it’s easier for your stakeholders to quickly digest the information. 

6.png

 

 

7.  Customize the look and feel of your chart by adding labels, changing colors, fonts, size, gridlines and more to create the chart you need. Edit the titles inline by simply clicking and typing the text you wish to create.

insight customize.gif

 

 

8.  The Insight tool has two modes, design and preview. Design mode allows you to add new charts and text, position and size. Preview allows you to verify the behavior (hover/highlighting, drilldown, filter) before sharing.

insight design.gif 

9.  Add filters on the right side while in Design mode to enable the consumers of your analysis to focus on what’s important to them.

 

insight dashboard (2).PNG

 

 

10.  Use the Preview mode to check everything is working as expected and share your Insights to Gallery in the upper-right corner to bring your insights to life for everyone across your organization.

 insight preview.gif

 

Watch the video below to see it in action, download our trial or upgrade to 2018.3 to take our new Visualytics Insight experience for a spin!

 

Comments
machazthegamer
7 - Meteor

What's the use case for this? We normally use Alteryx to do ETL on our data the load the output to Qlikview and PowerBI. It works fine for us. I really like Alteryx but I don't get the problem you are solving with this tool. Are you now competing with other dashboard technologies? Should we expect this tool to develop into a full blown dashboard technology in future?

apolly
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Hi machazthegamer,

 

I'm happy to hear that Alteryx is solving part of your use case currently. The new Insight tool allows you to create dashboards that you can share throughout your organization. This can be an effective way to communicate out findings from your analysis and we want to give users a way in Alteryx to share this interactive, visual information. As you will read above in the blog post, the Insight tool allows your audience to investigate the data in deeper detail with filter and drilldown capabilities. The tool will continue to evolve alongside the Reporting suite of tools. We understand how important it is for our customers to communicate out their analysis and we will improve the reporting and dashboard experiences.

 

Alex Polly

bala14_07
7 - Meteor

Hi

 

I am using Alteryx version 11.7.4, I don't see this Insight tool avaiable in my version. Do I need to update my alteryx version or possible to add this some way in the same version

ChaseA
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi bala14_07,

 

You will need to upgrade to 2018.3. You can find more information and a link to download on this post: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Analytics-Blog/Alteryx-Analytics-2018-3-Alters-the-Way-You-See-Anal...

bala14_07
7 - Meteor

@Chase

 

Thanks a lot Chase

Atabarezz
13 - Pulsar

@machazthegamer

 

 

 

 

ammyjhon
6 - Meteoroid

good

DawnDuong
13 - Pulsar
13 - Pulsar

Hi APoly,

Thanks for posting about the Insights tool. I connected the output of Interactive Chart to Insights tool and still saw a blank canvas in the Insights tool. What is supposed to happen it this case? Did the Insights tool pull the data through the Interactive Chart?

Dawn.

maximnl
5 - Atom

Microsoft has release data factory to replace ssis on Azure, powerbi becomes very popular.  I fail to see the edge of Alteryx so far. It seems to be userfrendliness and personal use but for incompany large scale deployment you guys need a clear edge. Wel i am new to this so my opinion can change if i see more applications. 

apolly
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
@DawnDuong Sorry I'm just getting back to you now, I didn't see the notification. We're you able to solve your problem? If not, I am happy to help. You can create a chart directly in the Insight tool if you'd like. Or if you already created a chart in the Interactive Chart tool, you can save it as a template in the Chart tool and import the template in the Insight tool. Reach out with other questions and I promise I'll get back to you in less time.
apolly
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Hi @maximnl, It's good that you are finding success with those other products as well. We hear from customers that it is not only our user-friendliness, but the repeatability, self-documentation/ease of audit, and sheer power of Alteryx when you dive into the more advanced use cases, that customers rely on in their e2e analytic process. A number of Fortune companies use Alteryx at scale with success and we hope to enable you to do the same. Please reach out to your sales manager and I believe they can further demonstrate everything that is available to you. Thanks, Alex
oliver_huber
7 - Meteor

Hi APolly,

 

thanks indeed for this useful intro. I see a lot of value in having a reactive dashboard with drill-down that runs out of the box on the Gallery. The Insights Tool could replace up to 80% of the more basic dashboards we are currently doing in another BI tool.

Though, besides some shortcomings I would consider "nice to haves" there are some essential features still missing. The most prominent one imho is a number-range-filter (similar to the date one that is available). Any plans to add this? More general, is there a "roadmap" for this very useful tool availabe that you coud share?

 

Thanks,

 

Oliver

 

nate1445
7 - Meteor

Hello,

 

I may be missing something, but prior to 2019.3 you had the ability within Insights to use the "Compare Data on Hover" option to see the key data points behind areas in a graph. With the release you seem to only get this info on the singular hover option "Show Closest Data On Hover". 

 

Will there be the availability to see all the data points that you see when selecting the Show Closest Data on Over when navigating with the "Compare Data on Hover" option?

 

Screenshots below showing the difference.

 

Show Closest Data Point on Hover:

Show Closest Data on HoverShow Closest Data on Hover

 

Compare Data on Hover - which is lacking the additional information to make the Insight meaningful:

 

Compare Data on HoverCompare Data on Hover

 

Thanks,

 

Nate

roddygh
5 - Atom

A huge improvement that would be utilized extensively across my organization is if you can create your own R plots in this dashboard and share it throughout an organization on Alteryx Server. The functionality of creating plots how you currently have it isn't quite there for many organizational needs and using R can solve this. I'm sure you guys will continue to improve and possibly incorporate this though. Until then...I don't see my organization adopting this and we will continue to use R Shiny, Spotfire Server, Etc.