Introduction

I have determined that I will not become a video blogger (I feel like a big dork on camera!). However, I awoke today with a thought that must be completed. I feel compelled to continue this story by doing what the great Paul Harvey used to do. He would say something to the effect of: “Now, the rest of the story.”

Now, The Rest of the Story

Concerning my previous blog post (Figure 1) on processing global travel data, I will tell you the story behind the story. To tell you this story will take me a few minutes by video or a few hours by text, so I’m going to pick the video. This is not an easy choice because it gives me butterflies in my stomach to do so.

Figure 1 – International travel patterns.

The reason that I need to tell you this is simple. What we did on Saturday was risky as the project could have crashed and burned before we solved it. Making a video blog about solving a complex problem is risky. Creating a video blog of solving a difficult problem BEFORE you even attempted to solve the problem is VERY RISKY. The problem we chose could have taken us many hours or days to solve efficiently (in fact, I thought it would, and Chas knew it would).

Alteryx extracted the salient pieces of travel information with one tool, followed by a series of operations to add new components to the analysis. These new components included geospatial calculations followed by seamless output integration to Tableau. The fact that it was solved in less than a couple of hours is a solid testimonial to the brilliance of Alteryx.

Finding the solution took trial and error, starts, stops, restarts, and serious thinking. It took collaboration between Chas and me. I referenced my blog several times to extract methods I’ve previously written about. In the end, a beautifully succinct and efficient solution technique in the form of a repeatable workflow was created.

This example illustrates why I am passionate about Alteryx and Tableau (don’t tell my wife about this blog post, please!). So without further ado…

The Final Chapter

In part 3 of this series, I invited Chas to explain how he attacked the problem. Click here to read the story from the perspective of Chas. I think this article has many interesting insights, and I encourage you to look into the conclusion of this article.

Thanks for reading!