Ok, so you’re impressed by Tableau. It’s shiny. It’s funky. You got a free copy. So far, so good.
But you’ve heard about another piece of software – Alteryx. Is that worth getting too?
Yes. Here are five reasons why.
- It’s great at cleaning messy data.
Like me, you’ve probably spent years cleaning messy Excel spreadsheets. Maybe another department has a particularly complicated template they fill out every quarter, and it’s your job to visualise the results. In Excel it takes ages to put the spreadsheet right: you’ve got to delete rows, remove the subtotals and pivot the entire worksheet. In Alteryx you could do this task in a handful of steps.
- Alteryx allows you to automate your processes.
Instead of laboriously cleaning up that spreadsheet every single quarter, once you’ve designed the process in Alteryx you won’t ever have to do it again. Just schedule the workflow to run at regular intervals.
- It’s great at getting data from the Internet.
Many websites publish APIs for developers to access their data. Once you’ve found the API link, you can download the data into Alteryx and manipulate it to your heart’s content.
- You can use it for spatial and predictive analytics.
Alteryx enables you to easily calculate distances between points and use this data in further analysis. It’s great for working out how far most of your customers travel to reach your shops, for example. There are in-built models for many types of predictive analysis within Alteryx too, ranging from linear regression to spline models.
- It’s easier to understand than traditional coding, and it’s a good introduction to programming.
Learning Alteryx is learning how to think like a programmer: you break every task down into its component parts, whilst working out how to design the process as simply as possible. At the same time, it’s highly visual, allowing you to picture what you’re doing.
