Despite all the advancements we see with generative AI technologies, cleaning and preparing datasets is still a time-consuming challenge for data professionals. Anaconda’s 2022 State of Data Science report indicates that 38% of a data scientist’s time is spent on data prep and cleansing.  Alteryx Designer enabled easy ‘drag & drop’ data prep for all, reducing the time to deliver clean datasets, making it easier to spot and detect data quality issues, and allowing more advanced data science techniques packed into a simple toolkit.  In May 2021, Alteryx released Designer in the Clo ..read more

Alteryx Designer makes supervised and unsupervised learning tasks pretty easy through two tool palettes, Predictive and Predictive Grouping. However, the results from the Predictive Grouping tools can be difficult to interpret – arrays of numbers with no particular relation to the data that you put in. In this blog series we’ll clarify how Alteryx reaches those numbers, and what they mean for your analysis. K- Centroids Diagnostics Tool The K-Centroids Diagnostics tool is like an early draft of clustering, to find out how many potential clusters are in the data. This “early drafting” is done ..read more

This blog post explores how to use Figma and Tableau together to create more visually appealing and effective data visualizations. What is Figma? Figma is a web-based design and prototyping tool that allows designers, developers, and other collaborators to work together in real-time. It’s often used for designing user interfaces, creating icons, and developing interactive prototypes. Whilst using Figma I found that it was like a souped up version of paint. It has similar features, drawing shapes, pens, pencils and text but with a much cleaner interface and many more formatting features. Why Co ..read more

Companies are often reluctant to change the way certain things are presented, especially when it comes to Excel and PowerPoint files and reports. These programs have been around for many years and most users in the firm are now somewhat used to navigating them. However, there are still ways you can help your company automate some of these more ‘traditional’ processes. In this blog post we look at how we can fully automate the process of updating an existing PowerPoint file using Alteryx. With Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft introduced a new file format for PowerPoint presentations – .pptx – w ..read more

Introduction There have often been use cases for users to be able to anonymise data, not filtering, for certain users on Tableau Cloud. From questionnaire data to sales performance, there are instances when you want to anonymise data and not filter it out. For example, if you’re collecting survey data for multiple external companies and you want them to be able to see their performance against the other companies (but understandably, can’t show actual values for the others), then you can use this technique to anonymise your data. The only supplementary data you’ll need is a lookup sheet of E-M ..read more

Whilst building a dashboard recently I found a use case for one of Tableau’s newer functions – Dynamic Zone Visibility. There were certain aspects of the dashboard that I wanted to show/hide depending on a user selection. A couple of specific requirements meant I couldn’t make use of some of Tableau’s inbuilt features:  I wanted both the show and hide buttons visible on the dashboard, so couldn’t use the ‘show/hide’ button function.  I also wanted to create and format my own buttons rather than using Tableau’s parameter controls. The following steps are the solution I came up with ..read more

In various industries, tracking open cases, or items—such as support tickets, overdue invoices, or waiting lists for medical treatments—is a common practice for business analysis and reporting. Traditional reporting methods usually focus on presenting real-time numbers, like the count of open support tickets, perhaps alongside a count of tickets opened and closed in the last 30 days and other similar performance metrics. For example, a dashboard may show that 100 support tickets are currently open and that this is pretty steady over time, or may be trending up a little or down a little and thu ..read more

It’s the part of the data engineering or dashboard building process that often gets forgotten: writing up your latest project and attributing a value to it to your organisation. The process of reflecting on and quantifying your work is where the real benefit to the organisation and also to you as an analyst is shown.  Let’s delve into why quantifying your work is not just a best practice but a fundamental necessity. What is quantifying your work? Putting a value to the last data pipeline you built, or the last report you built for the marketing team. It’s the last, but very important, pie ..read more

The three day conference hosted in Las Vegas by Tableau kicked off on the 9th of May. This was the first conference I have ever attended, so I was filled with anticipation and excitement to understand what they encompass. TC23 is an opportunity for Salesforce to showcase the direction that they are pushing Tableau in. This year’s conference had a very notable theme – AI. In the kick-off keynote – a host of AI-focused enhancements to Tableau were presented- TableauGPT, Tableau Pulse, and Tableau Gestures. For me personally, I found Tableau Pulse to be the most interesting of the three – notably ..read more

Ask Data is one of those features Tableau put a lot of work into both to make it useful to end users but also to fend off competition from alternative BI tools. A few years ago there was a rush in the market with vendors needing to say “we enable you to do BI using artificial intelligence and machine learning” in order to get a tick in an RoI rather than trying to explain why it wasn’t necessary or that it was “on the roadmap, we promise.” Now Tableau wasn’t the first to market with their solution and so when Ask Data launched with 2019.1 it had second-mover advantage. On the surface it is a r ..read more