New to Alteryx

[Chantal_OConnor]

Hi, I have been a business analyst at the same company for 30 years.  I have been predominately an MS Access user, doing a lot of adhoc projects.  My strength is more about the actual data in terms of meaning and how it impacts our operations.  I can read some basic SQL but never really did any coding.  I am working on using Alteryx as my primary tool for all my work.  I have some of the very basics down, but run into things that seem like they should be basic but struggle a bit.  Where is the best place on Community to post questions?  Designer??  An example currently is a Formula that calculates a cost using a field that is sometimes null and the null is returned (which is what I want it to return), however the messages give me a "divide by 0 error on item#234" and repeats for every item# where this occurs.  Should I care that Alteryx is giving me all these messages?  There are about 800,000 items with about 50% of them containing null.  I would love to post these types of questions out there but am not sure where to post.  Thank you very much!  So far I'm having fun learning this tool.  :-)

[mbarone]

Hi @Chantal_OConnor , welcome to the Community.  For questions, you'll want to look at the drop down menu under the "Participate" menu at the top, and pick the product you have a question on.  For tools, that would be the Designer discussion board.  Community members are great and usually you'll get responses quicker than you'd think.  Also, be sure to bookmark the Tool Mastery Index which takes a deeper dive into the tools.  And you can also hit F1 while your mouse is on the tool itself to be taken to that tool's help file.

For what you posted above, it sounds like you need to account for zeros or null in the denominator.  Maybe something like "if there's a zero or null in column B, then make the value zero, otherwise, divide column A by column B.  I prefer boolean if/then statements because it's less typing (you don't need a "THEN", "ELSE", or "ENDIF" statement).  The structure of the boolean if/then is:
IIF(X,Y,Z), reading as "If X, then Y, otherwise Z".  And you can nest them as much as you like.

So what I mentioned above would look like this IIF([column B]=0 OR IsNull([column B]),0,[column A]/[column B]).

[AbhilashR]

Hi @Chantal_OConnor, welcome to the Alteryx Community! 

[TheOC]

hey @Chantal_OConnor !

Hope you are enjoying Alteryx so far, by the sounds of things, it will fit in perfectly with what you are wanting to achieve!

I also hope you have managed to solve your formula issue, if not do let me know and i can help you have a look at it.

On the note of getting help and learning more, 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

[Alteryx_AR]

@Chantal_OConnor  Welcome to the community !