A few people have asked me how to start their journey with Alteryx and so I decided to write down what I know so it’s easier to pass the information.
First of all, there are a few different products that Alteryx offers. Assuming you’re new to the platform, you’re very likely to start with Alteryx Designer. It’s a program that allows you to prepare and analyse data in various ways, from simple operations to spatial and predictive analytics. This is what I’ll focus on in this post and will refer to it as Alteryx.
How to get your hands on Alteryx?
One way to start using Alteryx is to get a 14-day trial version, that you can download here. To continue after the trial ends, you will need to get a license.
Resources
Where do I start?
If you’re London-based, I highly recommend The Information Lab’s Alteryx Designer Essentials courses. It’s a great way to learn how Alteryx works and how to build workflows, all through hands-on exercises. The courses are free of charge and run regularly. You can find out the times on our meetup page.
If you’re not London-based, don’t worry, there are other resources you can use. Alteryx Community is a great place to learn about Alteryx: it has blogs, forums, its own Academy web page. In other words, plenty of resources. From the Academy Overview, you can access Interactive Lessons and Live Training sessions.
What next?
Weekly Challenges
Once you’ve got the basics, Weekly Challenges are a fantastic way to improve your skills and learn new tools. The idea is to create a workflow that will transform the input data into the desired output. The challenges have varied difficulty and topics so you can easily find something to put your skills to practice.
Once you have a solution, comment on the post and add the workflow as an attachment – this is how you get the badges! You can also see what the original solution was and what others have done to get the same response. A really good way to learn Alteryx as it gives you plenty of different use cases.
Alteryx Certified
Another good way to learn about the tools is to take the Alteryx Certification exams. First, you need to take the Core Exam, then you can continue with the Advanced Exam. You can take them as many times as you want (with 7 days between the attempts) and they are free of charge.
Personal Projects
The best way to practice though is to find a project, something you are personally interested in. The Data School Blog might come in handy when you search for solutions to specific problems you’re running into. The trick is not to give up 😉
