Welcome to the Alteryx tutorial. In any organization, data preparation is a vital step as it lays out the path for data discovery, data mining, and analytics. It will help the business gain insight into their data and streamline their processes to build a data-driven culture. That is why companies are adopting tools in ETL, data warehouse, data visualization, etc.
Alteryx offers several products that facilitate the need for data preparation, analytics, etc. Whether you are a beginner or experienced, this tutorial helps you in understanding the core features of Alteryx. We will also give you a step by step process for installing the Alteryx Designer. So what are we waiting for? Let’s dive deep into the details.
What is Alteryx?
Alteryx is a company that provides self-service data analytics products. The company is based out of Irvine, California. It was first released in the year 2006. The products offered by Alteryx are useful for data discovery, preparation, and analysis. It helps in deploying data analytics at a large scale and share them across peers.
Alteryx works as a workflow designer, where users can create flows to Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) data through a code-free environment. It can connect to several data sources and perform operations on data like profiling, preparation, and blending the data. It can filter data according to users preference and helps in building models like statistical, predictive, prescriptive, and spatial.
Features of Alteryx
The following are the features offered by Alteryx.
- Repeatable workflow – Users can create workflows by connecting to a source and destination. Alteryx helps in automating repeatable workflows.
- Code-free – It provides an interactive user interface through which users can create workflows easily. A person who has minimum to no programming knowledge can work with this tool easily.
- Deployable analytics – Users can build and deploy analytic models.
- Diverse tool – It offers connections to many data sources. It continues to grow over time by adding every data source that any user can think of.
- Governance – It provides security, collaboration, and governance to the analytics models that are created.
Advantages of Alteryx
Below are some of the advantages of Alteryx.
- It can connect to any type of data source on-premise or on the cloud. The data source can also be a spreadsheet, AWS, Salesforce, etc.
- The datasets can be of any size.
- The workflows can be created with drag and drop functionality.
- The workflows can be packaged and shared across peers.
- The analytics created can be shared among the organization.
- Users can deploy the analytics to a public analytics gallery where everyone can access it.
- The data from the data source can be accessed without using SQL scripts.
- Once the data preparation is done, it can be exposed directly into BI tools like Microsoft PowerBI, Qlik, and Tableau.
Products of Alteryx
Alteryx offers several products that serve different purposes. Let’s take a look at each one of them.
Alteryx APA Platform
It is a unified solution of analytics, data science, AutoML, and process automation. It delivers end-to-end automation of analytics and machine learning processes. It can automate repetitive workflows and encompass intelligent decision-making capabilities. Thus, making faster returns on the business process outcomes of an organization.
Alteryx Analytics Hub
The Analytics Hub is a centralized collaboration platform. Users can create workflows, share analytic assets, and automate processes. Using the Analytics Hub, users can maintain reports and insights in a central analytics environment. The cross-functional teams can work together by maintaining team workspace folders. It has a powerful search capability to find workflows, data, reports, etc.
Alteryx Designer
It is a data blending tool that helps in connecting to data sources and blend datasets. It provides ready-to-use automation building blocks and built-in predictive, prescriptive, and location analytics. It helps users in visualizing data throughout the problem-solving journey. It helps in discovering meaningful insights within the dataset. It also offers drill-down capabilities to further investigate the data.
Alteryx Server
Alteryx Server offers self-service data analytics and advanced administration options. It provides 24/7 dependability and helps avoid business interruptions and potential security issues. It provides the fastest way to deploy analytics across an organization. It offers built-in APIs and macros through which processes can be integrated directly into third-party applications. It also has built-in scheduling capability to run analytics whenever required. All the analytics created by developers in an organization can be moved to a trusted environment.
Alteryx Connect
Alteryx Connect works as a guide to all the data present in an organization. Users will be able to know where the information came from, who is using it, and how they are using it. It helps find and reuse data in data files, databases, dashboards, analytic apps, workflows, macros, etc. It lets everyone use a common place to store, share, and collaborate on data. This minimizes duplication efforts.
Alteryx Promote
Users can deploy predictive models for real-time applications. They can deploy custom R and Python models into production with fewer resources. It offers a code-free capability to deploy analytics. It manages the entire process from test to production. It provides version control so users can manage versions and also rollback whenever needed. It provides code snippets for Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Salesforce, and Node.js.
Alteryx Intelligence Suite
It can analyze semi-structured and unstructured data. It provides advanced analyzing functionalities like sentiment analysis, optical character recognition, text mining, etc. It also enables users to build predictive models using Machine Learning with just a few clicks that can be ready to deploy. Users can make use of natural language processing to identify insights in documents through drag and drop functionality.
Alteryx Datasets
Alteryx Datasets is a combination of Alteryx Location + Business Insight. The Location helps in pinpointing latitude and longitude on a map. This helps in exploring customers’ locations with satellite imagery. It uses TomTom traffic data to provide drivetime to users. The Business Insight makes it possible to understand the user demographic data with behavioural and retail purchasing information.
Installation of Alteryx Designer
Go to http://downloads.alteryx.com/ and select the version of the Alteryx Designer that is suitable for your operating system. An executable file of the Alteryx Designer will get downloaded. Run the executable file, and you will get Download Manager. Choose the appropriate version of the Designer and click on ‘Next’.
It will then show the list of prerequisites for the installation. Ensure that the prerequisites are met and click on ‘Next’. The installation will begin promptly. Keep clicking on ‘Next’ for the prompted screens. Accept the license agreement and click on ‘Next’. The installation of the Designer will begin. Once the installation is complete, you will get a prompt with the checkbox ‘Run Alteryx Now’ enabled by default. Click on ‘Finish’ to exit out of the Download Manager.
Conclusion
Alteryx is a specialized self-service analytics solution. It will be extremely useful for users like data analysts, data scientists, analytic leaders, C level executives, BI directors, etc. It helps the users easily transform data from a data source into a workflow. It acts as the predictive center of excellence for building various predictive models. You can analyze data faster and create smarter visualizations. Customers like Cisco, Abbott, Family Dollar, Western Union, Yankee Candle, and many more are using Alteryx now.