The last few days I have been working with Alteryx. This is a new software for me and the problem I have found is that I tried to dive into the task before actually knowing what I was actually being asked to do.

So how do you plan the data

To make this easier I will break down steps for what I've done for a particular challenge. This particular challenge was made for tableau prep but the challenge was to do this in Alteryx. Below is what the input data looks like the requirements for this task then what the output should look like.

Before considering the requirements lets first understand what this data is telling us. The first dataset simply shows information on the students such as name, gender, age, student ID. This dataset also has information on the parents such as their name and contact information. The second data set looks at the grades for each subject based on each student ID.

We can already see that there is a relationship between these datasets and can be joined together. Before we consider the requirements we should consider the output to see what kind of steps we might want to take.

We can see from just looking at the output that we are going to need to create students overall average scores, passed subjects as well as remove some columns (there is more steps to get to this but this is just at a glance). Now lets consider the requirements.

To approach this I found breaking it down into sections the best way to do this. By this I went through a few requirements and made a plan. Then inputted my data as a new input and then started the plan again. (Below shows the plan I took for this task).

First stage- This was the step I stopped at to try in Alteryx to see how my data would look. Shown below was the output I got and as we can see we are getting closer to the answer. My plan follows the requirements but what I thought I would need to do in Alteryx.

The next set of requirements we knew some sort of calculation tool was needed as we needed to get average and a way to get to the number for passed subjects.  

This process did come with some trial and error to get to the final results but planning this process made it a lot easier to work out and get to the result.

The pictures below shows my final Alteryx flow and the output I got. Also do not forget to ask questions and discuss your thought process because this helps you understand the breakdowns and requirements easier.