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Category Archives: Alteryx


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Alteryx: 9.0, 9.1 & Beyond

When the Alteryx 9.0 release got near crunch time, I got busy and obviously stopped posting here.  Once you get out of the habit, you forget to start back up.  Anyway, the time has come to start up again.

I hope that I am going to see many of you in just over a week at Inspire.  Inspire is many things to different people, but to me it is a chance to connect to our customers.  I will be found in the Solutions Center for as much time as I can possible manage.  I love talking to customers, helping your with issues, listening to product ideas, and just generally understanding how you work.  Please do not hesitate to ask me anything – in the solution center, at meals, or any other time you see me.

Inspire really is an amazing opportunity for clients, prospects and us in development to connect.  Many times what we learn there talking to people can shape the road map for months or even years to come.  So if you are on the fence, it really is worth it, I promise.  Again, I hope to see you there.
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Alteryx: Simple Batch Macros

This comment asks how to create a simple batch macro in Alteryx.  Batch macros can seem very intimidating, but they are really quite easy to build once you understand how they work.

The 1st thing to understand is that you will be building 2 modules, not 1.  The batch macro itself is designed to process a single item, however you define item, and the module outside sends in a list of items.  In the case of this specific question, he would like to read a list of files, do some simple processing on them and then write them back out. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: Amazon S3 & the Gallery

AmazonS3DownloadA variety of questions have come up from Alteryx users that all have the same answer:

  • The Alteryx Gallery will only allow me to upload about 100MB of data, how do I upload more?
  • I need to change my data daily/hourly/monthly for my Gallery module, how do I do that without re-uploading my entire app every time?
  • How do I persist data from run to run in a Gallery module?
  • How do I share data in Alteryx Desktop with coworkers/clients/partners without sending huge files around?

The answer to all of these questions is to use the Amazon S3 tools. What is S3?  Amazon says it is:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web-services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: It Takes a Village

I get a lot of the credit for Alteryx – the product. Having been the original author and still the lead architect that makes sense, but there are a whole host of people who deserve the credit as much or more than I do. Some of the people are the fantastic programmers you have met every year at Inspire, like Linda or Rob among many others who have contributed hugely. Others are the team of product managers, like the original Alteryx product manager: Tara. More recently there has been an influx of new energy from people like George, Dan, Geoff, Ben and many others helping to take the product to the next level. Obviously my co-founders Libby & Dean have had at least as much impact on the product as I have as well. There are just so many people who have made such a huge impact on the product and the users of it that it would be impossible to name them all. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: A Reusable NVD3 Macro

imageAs I am drawing to a close in exploring interactive charting in Alteryx, I wanted to create a macro for the people who say “Can’t I just have it now?”   One of the great things about Alteryx is the macro system and the fact that you kind of can have it now.  Once again, I am wrapping the NVD3 library as a starting point.  The macro has 4 different chart types exposed:  Line, Bar, Area and Scatter Plots.  I produced samples for the 1st three.  NVD3 supports lots more types of charts, but most of the rest take more specific user input or only work for a limited number of dimensions.  For this example I wanted to keep it simple.  Obviously if we were to actually productize a charting system like this, there would be lots more options, and probably not even limited to NVD3.

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Alteryx: Spatial Data Output (GeoJSON)

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Continuing the series prototyping HTML based visualizations, I want to look at spatial data.  One of the strengths of Alteryx is that spatial data is just data.  It doesn’t claim to be a GIS product, it just assumes that every organization has spatial data and would like to process it with the rest of their data and specifically they don’t want to have to use multiple products to do it.

So far in my prototype I have ignored spatial data.  Clearly if we decide to add new visualization features in Alteryx, spatial needs to be a 1st class part of it.  Since this prototype is entirely based on HTML and JavaScript, we need to start with what spatial data looks like in that environment.  Fortunately, there is already a standard for spatial data in JSON: GeoJSON.

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Alteryx: Interactive HTML Visualizations

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In the last 2 weeks, I have introduced (as a prototype) the idea of embedding HTML visualizations into Alteryx.  If you have not read them you can read Part 1: JSON Data Output and Part 2: HTML5 Visualizations.  In last week’s post, I explored a generic HTML 5 output tool and a sample visualization based on NVD3.  Although I was able to return a very nice visual from NVd3, all interactivity was lost.  This week I want to show a prototype with the interactivity working the way it should in NVD3.

Looking at the screenshot on the left, you can see an App running in the Gallery with a NVD3 chart.  In that particular screenshot, my mouse is over the US in 1995 so NVd3 displays a popup with the relevant information at that point.  You can also click on the modes (Stacked, Stream & Expanded) to show different views and you can click on the countries at the top, or in the graph itself to only show a subset of the data.  This is how NVD3 is designed to run. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: HTML5 Visualizations

4ffdaf0d245ff2ea4a089507d3b99c1eLast week I introduced potentially new visualizations for Alteryx based on HTML5 and its associated parts like JavaScript and SVG.  I started with a macro to write JSON data files from Alteryx.  This week I continue the prototype with a macro to actually render HTML 5 into an Alteryx report.

Skipping to the end of the story, on the left is a chart created using nvd3 in Alteryx.  I found some nice sample data for visualizing from the world bank showing the GDP of every country (and region) in the world since 1960.  The selected data I chose to show is the top 10 countries by GDP since 1980 – the data before then seems to be lacking in some detail.  I show the data as a stacked bar chart, which means that the top line is the total GDP for all 10 countries with each country’s part of the total shown by the height of a specific color. Continue reading →


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Alteryx: JSON Data Output

I am working on a prototype for Alteryx of some new charting/visualization ideas.  For most prototypes we do the audience would be strictly internal, but this time I am going to try something different.  As I move forward developing the prototype, I am going to be sharing it with the readers of this blog in order to get as much feedback as I can as early as possible in the process.  The idea is to use JavaScript & SVG for visualization/charting from within Alteryx.  We could of course extend the charting tool we have, but there is a lot of energy in the open source world right now going on with JavaScript visualization.  We want to evaluate the idea of utilizing some of the work that other people are doing – otherwise known as standing on the shoulders of giants.  Some of the specific libraries we are looking at include:  D3, NVD3 and RAW.  There are many, many others, so if we were to integrate a JavaScript engine in a generic way, we could open up Alteryx to all kinds of cool things. Continue reading →


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Food Desert – Follow Up

28d23fa76b95f5bc445e0e5b37e5c928I had a few follow on requests from yesterday’s post…  The 1st was for a map of Alaska.  I feel a little guilty for not including it in the first place, but it is difficult to make an aesthetic  map that includes the contiguous states and Alaska and Hawaii (I would be remiss at this point if I didn’t include that too.)  I made them both pretty high resolution, so I changed the scale so 1 dot equals 50 people instead of 500 for the national map. Continue reading →