Well, we survived the heat of the summer! With autumn on our doorstep and the summer heat finally breaking here in the northern hemisphere, our US and EMEA teams are looking forward to dusting off our boots, jackets and pants again. For me, personally, I’ll just be glad to not sweat every time I even think about going outside into that dreaded Oklahoma heat! September was the busiest month on the blog in a hot second, with a total of 26 stories between the main (and newly redesigned!) InterWorks blog and the Curator by InterWorks blog. Variety is the name of the game with this roundup, featur ..read more

Recently, we hosted a webinar that focused on the anchoring question of, What is data prep and what tools can help me with it? “The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight” – Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard We feel like this is everyone’s goal—anyone who is doing statistical analysis, data modeling, visualizations or reporting on data. You’re trying to gain insight into what that data is trying to tell you. Raw data inherently doesn’t have that information; you have to work with it, shape it, clean it and create calculations to really gain the insight from i ..read more

At InterWorks, we really love our jobs – not just because we do cutting-edge work that keeps us creative and our skills in tip-top shape, but also because we’re a part of a sensational data and tech community that includes our clients, partners and—of course—our team members. We talk a lot on the blog about the final outcomes of innovative projects and the awesome byproducts of our valuable partnerships, but in this series, we’re going to turn inward and share about what it’s like to work at InterWorks through the lenses of various team members. We hope you find it enjoyable, engaging and mak ..read more

A regular expression, also commonly known as RegEx (pronounced as /reh-JEKS/), is a powerful text-processing framework that uses a sequence of characters to define a search pattern. It is a widely used method to identify if a pattern exists in a chunk of text, and it helps you extract that information if you need it. As a data analytics professional, possessing a fundamental understanding of RegEx can significantly improve your productivity and ability to perform various data transformation tasks for projects that involve text-based data. Why Should I Learn RegEx? Alteryx comes pre-built with ..read more

Order up! We have another month’s worth of hot and fresh data resources ready for you. In this blog roundup, we feature a new Snowflake blog series, a summertime playlist, more webinar recordings than ever and our tried-and-true Tableau tips. With 23 published posts and 30 contributors, we think you’ll be able to find something and someone who’s speaking to your current challenge, whether it’s an analytics roadblock or running out of new music. Explore the list below to get started: News, Events and Culture The Sound of InterWorks: Summer Quarantunes Recapping the Data Science Go Virtual Con ..read more

What technologies can you pair to enhance the data experience? How can the right blend of tech help you do your job faster and more easily? In this webinar, we hear from Global Database Administrator & BI Analyst at TenCate, Scott Perry, alongside InterWorks’ Dan Murray as they discuss use cases for Tableau, Snowflake, Alteryx and Matillion working together. We cover: Scott’s personal data journey and tech discovery along the way How Scott leverages integrations between Tableau, Snowflake, Alteryx and Matillion to his advantage Challenges and wins within this tech stack Use case ..read more

This post is the companion to our recent webinar on the modern BI stack. I chose the word “deploying” here intentionally because doing it well means you never finish. You will be “deploying” permanently. It would be convenient for our crew and advantageous for all of our clients if we were able to participate in the earliest stages of every project. However, that’s rarely the case. We work with many fine companies, many have excellent technical staff, and some have senior leadership that already “gets it.” Most often, we come in after a project has already started, and sometimes we’re engaged ..read more

We know what dates Halloween, Christmas, and US Independence Day are on. But what about National Dogs in Politics Day or National Raisin Day? This Alteryx Weekly Challenge starts with a list of unofficial holidays, and the goal is to put them in order from January 1 to December 31. Pretty straightforward, right? Choosing the Best Tools for the Challenge Those of you with eagle eyes (not me!) may have noticed some leading spaces in the Day field. However, we can see in the Input step that there are small red triangles indicating bad data. If we hover over, there will be an indicator that there ..read more

Question: My workflow runs fine locally, but after publishing, it fails with the error below. Any insight into what I need to do? As we all know, Alteryx is a very powerful tool allowing for connections to a variety of systems and data for both Input and Output tools. In this example, we’ll see how setup led to the above error, but the fix is very simple. Examining the Workflow Digging a little deeper into this workflow, the client was connecting to a SharePoint list that was being updated by the field team. After processing through a variety of different tools, the output was to a SQL tab ..read more

What can an InterWorks consultant put together in an hour with unfamiliar data? This blog is designed to give a look at how an InterWorks consultant approaches developing a Tableau dashboard. Along the way, you will see some tricks employed to speed up the development process, as well as insight into some of the design choices made. The data we are dealing with in this case is data on the different sectors of the Danish economy from the Danish Government’s StatBank, their repository of statistical data. It is not the cleanest data to bring into Tableau, so I ran it through Alteryx to prepare ..read more