Introduction
Chas and Ken (Figure 1) learned about Alteryx and Tableau on Saturday. We decided to create a video blog of the experience.
This article includes a series of videos that take you along the journey of discovery. We decided to process global travel data to show how a complex situation can be turned into beautiful visualizations by using Alteryx and Tableau. We hope you enjoy the show!
Figure 1 – Chas Latch III (left) and Ken Black (right) work together in Austin, TX, on July 25, 2015.
Problem Definition
Meet Chas
Whiteboarding the Problem
Make Travel Data Anonymous
Build Alteryx Workflow
Visualize Results in Tableau
Final Thoughts
The data we used for this example was transformed in significant ways by Alteryx. Figure 2 shows the initial data definition, including the travel itinerary field in column F. This field was parsed using regular expressions and transposed in one operation in Alteryx. This is simply stunning and very efficient.
Figure 2 – Initial data set before modifications in Alteryx.
The Alteryx workflow shown in Figure 3 is what we developed over 2 hours. This amount of work that can be done so quickly still amazes me.
Figure 3 – The Alteryx workflow for transforming the data shown in Figure 2 to the data shown below in Figure 4.
The final data set is shown in Figure 3. Notice that the two records shown in Figure 2 now occupy six records. Additional details have been added, such as travel path, travel distance along the flight path, and cumulative distance traveled. The 91,000 trips contained in the data expanded to over 300,000 records. It took Alteryx 14 seconds to process that data set to write an Excel and Tableau TDE file. Wow. End of Story.
Figure 4 – Final data set sent to Tableau to create the visualizations shown previously. The data set was created by the Alteryx workflow shown in Figure 3.
Part 2 – The Story Behind the Story
Click here to watch Part 2 of this series.
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