Introduction I have been writing a lot of Tableau articles that are gathered together in a place called 3danim8’s Blog. I do this to help people learn how to solve data-science type problems. These problems arise in business, math and science and I use great software tools like Tableau and Alteryx to find the solutions. I…
Introduction The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for 3danim’s blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 47,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for…
Introduction Flat-files have been used around the world of the past few decades to store a lot of data. Flat-files were originally designed to save space, although they do have an intrinsic inefficiency because spaces are used as placeholders instead of using a delimiter, like a comma.
Introduction This post is NOT really intended to be a super-clean and comprehensive, step-by-step instruction set for how to draw Alteryx-generated polygons in Tableau. However, if you are willing to do a little work, you will be able to reproduce the results in this article.
Introduction One of the most popular topics I have written about in this blog is a method I call “Tableau buckets”. I have been very surprised by the number of people that have found this concept to be useful. For this reason, I am going to extend this “bucket” concept to Alteryx workflows.
Introduction Sorting data is fundamental technique and is a skill that anyone that frequently works with data needs to possess. I have sorted a lot of data through the years, for many different reasons. Sometimes the only way to get a job done when working with a wide variety of data sources that might include periodic data…
Introduction Writing a technical blog is challenging in many ways. Finding topics to include in your blog is just one of the challenges. This story helps elucidate this challenge from my perspective.
Introduction This is blog post number 101, and I now have a clarity about 3danim8’s blog that I did not have before I started writing it a year and a half ago. It took me writing the previous 100 blog posts to gain this clear vision and to develop my mission statement. It only took me 536 days,…
Introduction I have been thinking a lot about how Alteryx and Tableau work together to help me innovate when solving business and science problems. In this article, I’m going to explain what I mean by the term innovation and how I use Alteryx and Tableau to achieve this term.
A New Vision This was a difficult article for me to write for a lot of reasons, but I am glad that I wrote it. In this two-part article, which will be my 99th and my 100th blog posts, I revisit my past and present a revised vision for my future as a technical blogger.
Introduction I had just hit the enter button to send the email. It was 12:21 am (just past midnight) and within five seconds the phone rang. My wife was lying in bed behind me, my phone was on the bedside table beside her and she says to me: “Who is that?”. Without any doubt of who…
This article includes a lot of tips for working with dates in Alteryx. The dates can be read from flat files but I also include some tips for reading dates from *.csv files.
Introduction I previously wrote about solving seemingly impossible problems with Alteryx. While writing the workflows for the challenging problem I described in that article, I discovered a few interesting aspects of how Alteryx handles leading zero fields and performs date conversions. Since these topics took me a bit of testing to understand, I thought that these insights…
Introduction I started using Alteryx in May, 2014, or less than six months ago. I have written a few blog posts for beginners and a recent post about a very impressive result I achieved using Alteryx. Now all of a sudden, the light has shined for me. I get it and I see the brilliance…
Introduction I previously wrote a blog post about strategies for reading flat-files (fixed-format, un-delimited ASCII files) to get the flat-file data ready for Tableau analysis. That post was written before I became an Alteryx user.