Portland Alteryx User Group April, 2019 Meeting Recap

[otto]

Hi, all! We had a great meeting last Friday. A big thanks to @NicoleJohnson, who traveled down from Seattle to join us and present about her Alteryx & career journey. We enjoyed hearing how she has become a Alteryx ACE, Grand Prix champion, and leader in her organization. It was inspiring to hear how building toward goals and a perseverance can lead to success. 

Nicole Johnson shares about her Grand Prix experience

Nicole highlighted how she utilized Community & Weekly Challenges to prepare for the Grand Prix and keep her skills sharp. The group discussed some best practices for getting involved with the wider Alteryx community and how to get support for problems or tips on how to break through of roadblocks while building workflows. 

Nicole shared her path to Alteryx-ing her career

Isaac walked through some Weekly Challenges to dovetail with Nicole's presentation and we looked at some alternate ways to solve the challenges. One of the great things about Weekly Challenges and posting on community is the high level of engagement from users. Challenges will often get several various approaches -- after completing a challenge you can go back through and learn new capabilities. (The formula tool is very powerful!)

During our discussion a couple questions came up about places to get data and where to access weekly challenges:

If you're looking for data sets to play with, here are a few online sources that have downloadable data:

Kaggle (various)

Data.World (various)

fivethirtyeight (politics, sports)

Tiger maps (US Government Census spatial objects)

MakoverMonday (Tableau visualization weekly challenge)

Weekly Challenges can be found under Academy on Community:

Questions on Community:

When asking questions on Community:

-  Don't be afraid! Alteryx has an engaged and supportive community

-  Provide as many details as you can! (ex SW version, example workflows, sample input data) 

Thanks and we're looking forward to seeing you at our next meeting! Check back in a couple weeks for details! 

-Isaac ( @otto ), David ( @davidhenington ) & Joshua ( @joshuaburkhow )

[LaurenU]

Epic shot of @NicoleJohnson !!

Looks like a fantastic meeting! I am seriously missing PDX...I should plan a trip up soonish. :P

[davidhenington]

Would be great to see you Lauren! We'll do a session recapping Inspire at the end of June, which is a great time to visit Portland! 

[chriswilliams41]

Hi everyone! I wanted to thank you so much for this user group meeting. This was tremendous! I'm anxious for the next one. I would love to present if you have room either next meeting or the following one. I'm not sure if you have set an agenda yet.  

[otto]

Hi, Chris! Thanks for reaching out. I have been planning on reaching out to you and glad you're still down to present. It would be excellent if you could present at either the next or subsequent meeting. We are currently trying to set a date and lock down a venue for our next meeting. We'll connect with you via email this week! Already shaping up to be a good meeting next time...

[chriswilliams41]

That's fantastic news! I'm just look to learn from you and share how I've done some things with the group. My email is chris@pag.biz. Reach out to me whenever. Thanks so much! :)

[davidhenington]

Hey Chris! Sorry I didn't get to meet you; i'll be at the next session though as well as Inspire!