We had a great turnout for our Q1 Long Beach Alteryx User Group!
About half our users are planning to attend Inspire 2019 in Nashville.
We had a ton of fun with a Kahoot! quiz of our Alteryx knowledge. Many congratulations to our top 5 - @Joe_Mako Joe Mako, @lundarius Lundy Lim, @Dynamomo Maureen Wolfson, @Krisss Kris Shenk, and @ZDREXLER Zachary Drexler!
We wrapped up the evening by firing up our laptops for a fantastic hands-on training in creating macros by @Dynamomo Maureen Wolfson!
We covered
- The various types of macros - standard, batch, iterative and location optimizer
- The macros already built into Alteryx such as data cleansing and select records
- Some notable macros in the Alteryx Gallery Macro District like BB Date and Cleanse
- How to turn your workflow into a macro by right-clicking a text input tool selecting convert to macro
- How to make your macro more flexible by dragging a connector from the "Q" on your macro input to a Select tool before your output, which creates an action tool defaulted for "Reverse Field Map"
- Tip - don't make a macro or an app until your standard workflow is already working great
- Tip - When you create a macro, don't input more fields than you need. Instead, modify your data source to contain only the fields being acted on by the macro. For instance, if you're parsing out a name, don't import the address or other fields into your macro too.
- Tip - One way to accomplish the above is to bring in your data and connect two selects and two outputs. Use one select for just the macro impacted fields and one for all the data and output both data sets. Use the runner macros to run this workflow, run the macro on the appropriate fields, and then run a workflow that brings all your data back together (p.s. that tip is from @ThizViz so if you have questions, just send me a message!)
We also came up with a couple of great ideas to add or vote for:
The ability to right-click on a browse tool (or any output) to convert to a macro output
To make the Alteryx Gallery like Connect, with certifiable macros and workflows, vote ability, and social curation.
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Welcome-to-Alteryx-Connect/idi-p/381409
There was some discussion about best practices, so I rounded up these links for everyone:
https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2019/02/14/documentation-best-practices-with-alteryx/
We're still working out the details for our next user group meeting, but we're leaning toward sometime in May, with an introduction to Connect and Promote by an Alteryx Solutions Engineer and a mini tour of Alteryx HQ in Irvine!
Edit: Added pdf of slide deck
