Day 1:

This week we start to prepare the Alteryx Core exams on Friday, so it will be Alteryx training for the whole week.

On Monday, we did mostly in data transform tab, which involve mostly Summarize, Transpose and Cross Tab. The latter two tools are used to pivot table to either long format or wide format, although they behave as a pair of opposite operation, Cross Tab is by far the most confusing tool within Alteryx that we have encountered so far.

Day 2:

Continue preparation for the Friday exams. We started the day by going through official exam guide and highlighted the tools will be tested in the exam. Most of the tool are already familiar to us to some degree, so the lesson wasn't too challenging. We used sample data to create our own tutorial workflow to showcase our understanding.

Afternoon session finished at 3pm, but we continued to work on Alteryx weekly challenge indicated by the exam guide, some are much trickier than the other.

Day 3:

On Wednesday, we had Ollie Clarke (Alteryx Ace) to help us prepare Friday's test. We emphasized more on Alteryx file format, user setting, data input, output tools, which we didn't have a lot experience of in the past.

Afternoon, we went through more examples on data blending such Transpose and Crosstab tool.

Day 4:

Continue on the Alteryx themed week, we had a session with Peter Gamble-Beresford on Macros. It is Alteryx's custom tool building mechanism. The three major form of Marcos are: Standard, Batch and Iterative. Although the principle of marcos are straight forward, any additional customization to allow more interaction for users will complete the process considerably. It is a step by step process with constantly trial with a sample data and more sessions are certainly going to be expected in the future.

Day 5:

This Friday, we took Alteryx Core Certification /*not exam*/ test. It is always stressful to take tests, luckily the practice on Alteryx weekly challenges paid off, even with some uncertainty about some questions, I did manage to pass in the first try with a better than expected score. Simple advice: Practice, practice and practice.

As we are advised to take the tests early, so we had more free time compared to previous Friday's manic rush on completing a dashboard.

In the afternoon, DS 23 continue to impress with their Snowflake project, mixed usage of SQL, server and dashboard building knowledge, again, set the bar high for our future projects.