Hi everyone! My name is Chantel and I am a member of the latest cohort at the Data School Down Under – DSAU4.
Our first week at the data school had been a bit of a whirlwind and we’ve been learning all about Alteryx. I must admit I was blown away by what Alteryx was capable of. I found it amazing how the drag and drop was so simple for a beginner like me to pick up, all while getting a taste of how much more was possible.
So what is so special about Alteryx?
Alteryx is a data analytics platform that is designed to make advanced analytics accessible to the average user. Alteryx Designer allows users to prepare, blend, transform, enrich and analyze data from many different sources. I’m very happy to leave the days of manually editing data in Excel behind me!
During the week we were lucky enough to meet one of the founders of Alteryx, Libby Adams. It was great hearing about the beginnings of the company and how she sees it growing in the future. We also attended an Alteryx event with a sneak peek at the new assisted predictive modelling tools.
First Data School Project
At the end of the first week we had our first project – blending one of our original data sets from our Data School application in with another data set. It was challenging under the time limit to figure out a good direction to go in with the data. My first application was on the 2018 Malaysian Election. The link for my original viz can be found here. I blended in demographic data with voting and location data of each of the polling centres as seen below. This allowed me to create a centroid with much more detailed data that can be used for further analysis. It is crazy to think how much time I would have saved when preparing the data if I had known how to use Alteryx when preparing my application!
After a week of great training from one of the coaches, Pete Goldsworthy, we have managed to go from complete beginners with the software to capable users. I thought at the end of the first week I’d give the core certification a go and was really happy to pass on the first attempt after just a week of training!
I am now looking forward to diving deeper into Alteryx and Tableau in the weeks coming up. Overall, I’m really glad to have joined the Data School and excited about what lies ahead.