Re-Cap - #14 London Alteryx User Group - 23/04/2018

[Joe_Lipski]

Thank you to everyone who attended the 14th London Alteryx User Group on Monday evening! It was great to see so many of you (60!) back at Alteryx HQ.

 

Here’s a summary of the afternoon to re-cap and for anyone who couldn’t make it.

We kicked off as usual with some great conversations amongst the group with AUG regulars and new-comers alike! A few housekeeping points and reminders with the most important being the following:

• Encouraging everyone to sign up and use the fantastic Alteryx Community and to check on the new Alter Everthing Podcast - https://community.alteryx.com/podcast
• Submit use cases for the Alteryx Analytics Excellence Awards by April 26^th 2018 for the chance of winning a $25,000 (!) prize to the charity of the winners choice
• Alteryx Inspire Europe 2018 registrations to open next Monday, but the call for speakers is already live and anyone interested should register here

Gillian Rodger's Alteryx story from Tesco and now Kurt Geiger

Gillian Rodger is currently Senior Data Visualisation Analyst at Kurt Geiger doing some amazing things with Exasol, Alteryx and Tableau which I’m looking forward to hearing all about. Prior to Kurt Geiger, Gillian spent 7 years at SkyScanner and Tesco working on a magnitude of analytics and BI projects.

Gillian talked about how a use case at Tesco saved everyone’s Christmas, by ensuring that no one went without Turkey! This was down with some innovative integrations between data sources and automatic notifications using Slack that we’re pushed out using the Alteryx Download tool!

Gillian’s second use case talked around how quick and easy it was to use Alteryx for all areas of their ETL process to migrate from legacy datawarehoues into Alteryx using 18 workflows all controlled by the amazing CREW Macros and our course she had implemented the slack integration here to push out alerts if there was something wrong with an overnight load!

 

Adam Riley – Testing Workflows

If you don't already know Adam Riley has been building Alteryx for the past 7 years and I'm not sure if there are many people more knowledgeable about the product. He's the creator of CREW Macros which are available on his blog http://chaosreignswithin.com  which I know have helped me greatly countless times!

I won’t detailed too much of Adam’s talk as I know he’s on the bill to present at Inspire in June this year, but Adam gave us a great insight into some of the techniques that he personally uses when testing his own workflows with inbuilt mechanisms to do this being: The Test tool and the Message tool.

Adam went one step further and introduced the group to his CREW Macro test tools which I have to admit that havn’t used before, but will certainly be adding them to my workflows from now on - Especially the Expect Zero Records to the L and R of a Join tool!

Open-Mic Macros (<5 mins per macro)

A new idea for this user group which I hope you all enjoyed was to invite participants to show us a macro or two that they developed which could have uses for others. Many thanks to the presenters who are tagged below and the hyperlinks go to the Alteryx Gallery where the macro can be downloaded. As discussed on the day some of the macros aren’t ready to be published onto the gallery, so please feel free to message the creator via the community for more info:

• @jakemancer (presented by @rpharding1) - Route 360 International Drivetimes (soon to be published to the gallery)
• @rpharding1 - Thematic polygon heat-mapping
• @charlie_archer - Google Travel Time
• @Joe_Lipski - Download all Tableau Server Extract Details
• @BenMoss - Publish Tableau Workbook
• @BenMoss - Get Twitter Followers/Friends
• @BenMoss – Read in password protected Excel files
• Steven Yu - Utilizing Exasol Metadata in Alteryx
• Sophie Decelle: Comparing Same Metric Other Period
• Bingqian Gao: Time Series Forecasting Macro
• @peter_gb – Cognitive Services Text Translation
• @peter_gb – Get Google Directions

And finally (whether you attended on Monday or not) please could you fill out our April 2018 User Group Survey to help us continue to improve the future user groups: 

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/BZ7SF8B

THANK YOU!!!

[steven4320555]

Thanks for organizing the user group meeting, and writing up the re-cap. It is as inspiring and fruitful as always.

Sorry that I have not managed to tidy up the macro, as there are some barriers created by Tableau not interpreting the table name of Exasol correctly, I have tested new release Tableau 2018.1, the problem persists. I will try to share more details in the coming weeks.

For people who want to get more information, there is a link on Mark Jackson's site to download his version. 

[As shared in the Meetup page, the idea comes from a Tableau Zen master Mark Jackson, with some customization for 1) desktop use, 2) meta data use, 3) added view information etc. 
[The link for Mark Jackson's blog]http://ugamarkj.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/automated-metadata-documentation-for.html
[Mark's updated version using Python is also available http://ugamarkj.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/automated-data-lineage-documentation.html]

To custermize the macro or tds file, some understanding on the structure of tds is very helpful.  Tableau's Bryant Howell shared this here: https://tableauandbehold.com/2016/06/29/defining-a-tableau-data-source-programmatically/

Mark's most recent work on this can be found in his twitter:
https://twitter.com/ugamarkj/status/974061888064630784

ZHANG Yu (Steven)

[TuvyL]

Wonderful recap and I'm loving the photos! @Joe_Lipski let's please have one around Inspire London ;) We'd love to see all the magic live in action!