New to Alteryx

Question

I am currently learning Alteryx in one of my classes for Accounting, and I found it very helpful. I wish I had known before about Alteryx. However, Alteryx seems like a useful tool for Accounting and specifically for Audit. Any advice on what I should focus on? Thank you!

Alteryx_AR · Answer

@azdebska -  Welcome to the Alteryx Community and thanks for introducing yourself.

Here are few tips that helps you -

* Interactive Lessons- - Without a doubt the Alteryx interactive lessons had been an amazing plattaform to expand knowledge of what is even possible with Alteryx. I strongly recommend to check and absorb as much as possible. Interactive Lessons - Alteryx Community.

* Help documentations –I started learning Alteryx through documentations in the site.   Documentation | Alteryx Help

* Weekly challenges- They get posted up weekly, at three different difficulty levels, by members of the Alteryx community. These challenges include data preparation, analysis, spatial and much more.  Sometimes I am not be able to complete the challenge but with a quick search at someone else’s solution I will find a way. The single biggest thing to realize about Alteryx is that there is almost always more than one way of getting to a solution - what separates the beginners from the advanced users is being able to identify which one of the multiple ways suits each particular situation. Weekly Challenge - Alteryx Community.

* User  Group - I am sure it will help you a lot. User Groups - Alteryx Community

* Tool Mastery- I have found the Tool Mastery knowledge base articles particularly useful, especially if I want to understand how and why a specific tool was used.

* Sample Workflows in Designer- Alteryx Designer contains a number of sample workflows to demonstrate tool functionality and use cases. We can access these directly in Designer top menu. Help > Sample workflows

* Discussions- And also the power of the community answering questions and posting questions...
* Certifications-There are three main certifications that Alteryx provides. Core, Advanced and expert. Core and advanced are free of any cost. Preparing for these exams helps a lot to enhance knowledge and upskill myself.  Certification - Alteryx Community

TheOC · Answer

Hey @azdebska ,
I would recommend looking at the weekly challenges, and finding some that relate to your classes/industry. 
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Weekly-Challenge/bd-p/weeklychallenge

There are also the use-cases, which can be good to understand how it is being used across the industry:
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Use-Cases/tkb-p/use-cases

Be sure to have a look around the community - its really a fantastic place for learning. A couple of resources I would especially recommend knowing about are:

* Alteryx Designer Discussions - A place where users can ask questions about specific Designer workflows they are working on, and receive help from members on the community. Typical response time (from what I've seen) is under 10 minutes for someone to reply with a potential solution, so its a very quick resource for bespoke information. Additionally, you can search using the search function at the top right for specific issues if you happen to run into any that may have been faced by other users before.
* Alteryx User Groups - When I first got into Alteryx, I didn't join User Groups as I thought they would be very technical and that I would need plenty of experience before diving in. However, they really aren't. User groups are an incredibly friendly environment to discuss workflows, what's going on in the Alteryx World, and a great place to network with people in the community. Even better, with the world still being very much virtual at the moment, most of the User Groups (including the North East UK User Group, which I am currently a leader of) are hosting virtual events so they are easy to join.
* The Alteryx Academy - Easily the best place to learn about Alteryx and how to use it. I would especially recommend the learning paths which include short snippets of learning specific topics, including Alteryx for Excel users, which helped me translate a lot of my Excel knowledge over to Alteryx. There are also the weekly challenges, which are challenges delivered by Alteryx on a weekly basis, based around real-life situations and community submitted problems. They are a fantastic way to learn practical uses of Designer, and also its really interesting to see the many different approaches to answering the same problem. Once you have progressed with learning Alteryx, I would definitely recommend the Alteryx Certifications. They are free to do (Core and Advanced), and provide a useful benchmark for your knowledge. You can also just take them again in 7 days, in the case that you don't pass, so don't feel any pressure to know everything before you give them a go!

I hope you find Alteryx to be easy to learn, and intuitive to use. Do remember that almost every tool has an example workflow and help documentation if you right click the tool in the tool palette:

("Help" for the tool documentation, "Open Example" for the example workflow).

And be sure to search for/ask for help on the community if you get stuck. Alternatively, feel free to drop me a message here on the community!

Cheers,
TheOC

dougperez · Answer

Hello @azdebska !

Nice to meet you! My only advice is to look into the "Learn" tab here in community, we have a lot of materials to help: learning paths, interactive lessons, videos and weekly challenges that can help you to grow your knowledge!