Automating Excel Pivot Tables with Alteryx Batch Macros and Server

What were you trying to do? Automate Excel pivot tables. I had a table of data, and from it an Excel-generated pivot table. The pivot table was sorted to show client rankings for different combinations of factors. The factors were changed manually, and the ranking for each client was output to a formatted spreadsheet for…

Business Dashboards

I first thought about dashboards probably around 2010, when I was seconded to help on a new strategy for a new CEO of a financial institution. He told the team that he wanted a tool that would give him an overview of how various parts of the company were doing, all in one place, that…

How to build (even) more robust Alteryx workflows

Ever had a workflow error out due to a change in an input somewhere? Or perhaps a batch macro stops running and you don’t know what the problem is? Fortunately, Alteryx makes it easy to build alerts into your workflows that tell you what the problem is, where it is, and how to fix it.…

More fun with prime numbers in Alteryx

Upon completing Alteryx Weekly Challenge #79, I had one remaining related sub-challenge that I wanted to solve with Alteryx. That was to find the nearest prime to a given number n based on a lookup table, but one that had memory. So that if a number was larger than the largest prime in the lookup…

Prime Numbers: How One Alteryx Weekly Challenge Led Me Down a Rabbit Hole

Why do people like prime numbers? Prime numbers are intuitive enough for anyone to access (integers only divisible by 1 and itself), yet they tickle the imagination by going off to infinity without any pattern. Christopher, the main character in the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon, describes…

Digital Nomad Index: Where are we going next?

Being interested in remote work and having met a fair number of digital nomads/remote workers in my travels, I decided to look for data on internet speed by country and cost of living. I have actually used Numbeo's very user-friendly and informative Cost of Living data on their website in the past and had recently…

2 Quicktips for Handling Large Alteryx Workflows

Enable the Overview setting in the View toolbar (or hit Ctrl+Alt+V) and a tiny version of your workflow will appear at the bottom of your configuration window. As you move around the workflow, a little highlight box moves around the Overview pane showing where in the workflow you are. You can also click and drag…

Long Overdue Reflection on Being Interviewed for the SuperDataScience Podcast

Way back in August, I was lucky enough to be invited to be a guest on Kirill Eremenko’s SuperDataScience podcast. Since then, my interview has been downloaded over 8000 times (I’m famous!) Kirill was in London the week my episode was out, so I finally met him in person at a dinner meetup with his…

Colour Alert Update (Tableau Quick Tip)

Hot off the back of the Tableau Conference 2017 in Las Vegas (#data17), I discover that one of Andy Kriebel’s tips on his Tableau Speed Tipping Rematch with Jeff Shaffer makes creating a stepped colour scheme with a colour alert even easier! Again, this tip only works for a discrete field (although I have also…

How I created a stepped colour scheme with a colour alert in Tableau (using a discrete colour palette)

You may have read my previous post on creating a stepped colour scheme with a colour alert for a continuous field, but then realized that you have a discrete field (and it breaks the view when you try and change it to continuous!) and wondered how to achieve the same result with a discrete field.…