Making a workflow

Now let’s try to visualize making a workflow let’s start by adding an input data to our canvas click on the in slash out tool category and drag the input tool to the canvas this tool will bring in a file or a database connection to our workflow to add a file click on the arrow on the configuration window this will open a data connections window that shows you the recent files you have used your saved data the file data sources and gallery both the file and data sources tab lists all the types of files and data connections supported by alteryx to add a file you can click on select a file and navigate to a file in your data folder or drag and drop a file from your file explorer if you choose an excel file it will direct you to a window where you can either select a sheet and or specify a range of cells that you need or you can import the sheet names only since we will use the data inside the sheet we selected the latter click on OK to apply ,the options section will be different for each file type unless you specify how the file will be read.

On an excel file, we first have the record limit you can add a specific number of rows if you only want a sample of that data the file format is the table or query, in this case, it contains our sheet name search sub-directories in only used if you are importing multiple files from a certain path, output file name as file adds the name of your file or your whole file path to your data first row contains data is for files that do not contain the header and the indicated row where you want to start the data import from the preview box below contains the first 100 records which can be fewer for wider files to review the complete data let’s add in a browsing tool the data will be shown in the results window once we run the workflow, on the results window you have a count of row records and the size of the data 

if you only wanted to see select fields you can show or hide them by selecting the field on the upper left of the window, you can also view the contents of a cell on the cell viewer and show if it has white space, you can also save this data as a new file by clicking on the save icon or copy it by clicking on the copy button

Data Quality

The metadata type shows the type size and source of each field column in your data set, a colon data quality bar displays at the top of each column of data in the results window red not okay the column contains values with leading or trailing white space yellow null the column contains no values gray empty the column contains strings with no values and green OK, the column contains values without leading or trailing white spaces if you wanted to check the data for a specific value type it in the search bar on the upper right and hit enter all rows associated with that value on one of their fields will be shown you can also sort and filter individual columns to do so click on the three dots on the field name and click on either filter or sort these filter and sort changes will not be a permanent step on your workflow unless you apply the tools to the canvas this will add in the filter or sort tool with the appropriate configurations that you have applied using the browse tool also allows you to look at the data profile of each column this is available in the browse configuration window if you haven’t selected any fields from the browse window it will show a tabular list of top occurring values of each column including the numbers of instances where it was available on the data selecting a specific field in the browse window will give you more insight on the column the information will vary depending on the data type of the column.

Conclusion

In our example, we have a numeric field the first chart contains the data quality summary of the field showing if a certain percentage of it has null empty or trailing white space the next chart has the value statistics of the field the bar chart has the grouped range of available data and shows which range has more recurring values since this is a numeric value it also shows us some simple statistical values such as the minimum, maximum and average value of the data lastly is a list of top values let’s take a look at a string field and see its profile difference we still have the same data quality chart but we have a bit of a difference on the statistical chart instead this makes use of the length of the strings and shows the shortest and longest value that it has and also has the first numeric value and the last it also shows a value chart with the most frequent value.  

Another way of adding in data to alteryx is via text input; it allows you to create a new stream of data without using a file or a database you can manually type in data from the configuration box.

Every tool gives you a brief explanation and an attached example if you click on it. All this information is more than sufficient to start using alteryx. Furthermore, the Alteryx community has a wide variety of already solved issues which are very beneficial, and learning a tool like this would definitely help you to kick start your data science career. 

Alteryx was recognized as a leader in Gartner’s 2018 magic quadrant for data science and machine learning platforms Gartner specifically recognized alteryx as the leader with the highest ability to execute on its vision alteryx. Alteryx’s easy to use solutions address the needs of a wide range of problem solvers from citizen data scientists to highly trained business analysts, the alteryx platform offers customers both a code-free and code-friendly approach, hundreds of automation building blocks and the ability to integrate with enterprise applications and robotic process automation or rpa to automate machine learning pipelines and business processes.,