Chapter 10. Best Practices

The data necessary for making critical business decisions is best consumed by streamlined workflows. The workflow layout can help you visually build workflows faster. Ensuring autosave is always set to save at faster incremental minutes will help make sure you don't lose that powerful workflow created. Apply data profiling throughout your workflow to visualize the data quality. In this chapter, you will learn best practice solutions for building efficient workflows, reviewing data exploration techniques, and handling data sources. These best practice guidelines, along with their associated tips and tricks, will save you valuable time in the business decision making process.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• The ultimate guide to workflow design
• Tips and tricks

The ultimate guide to workflow design

By now, you have a solid base on why Alteryx is so powerful for data blending, data cleansing, joining and aggregating data to help solve complex business problems accurately and quickly. This section will focus on how you can make your workflow designs more efficient and intuitive for you. Designing efficient workflows can not only speed up processing but also help with faster troubleshooting. More clarity around your workflows will lead to less time spent going through a scavenger hunt finding that favorite tool of yours. Let's go how to design your workflow layout, save your workflow more frequently, and apply data profiling to ensure you have optimal data quality.

Workflow layout

Design your workflow orientation horizontally or vertically. Whether you prefer to work from left to right or from top to bottom, the tools added to your workflows will be included based on the Layout Direction selection. Click anywhere in the canvas and in the Workflow -...

Tips and tricks

This section focuses on the tips and tricks that are handy time savers during the workflow development. Designing an optimal workflow is the first step for downstreaming data efficiency by utilizing the right tools in the right areas of your workflow. The quick tips and tricks are something that you want to stay with you forever, to help you quickly maneuver through the workflow within seconds. Let's take a look at these handy dandy tips and tricks.

Browse data

The Browse Everywhere option was introduced in Version 11 of Alteryx. This is where you can click on the output anchor of a tool and view the results without having to add a Browse tool to view your data! Sounds like a win win to me. The best part is the Browse tool contains more hidden gems, in one of the most used tools in Alteryx. Let's say you have many columns, and scrolling through the Browse tool to locate the columns may not be very easy. Within the Results - Browse configuration, you can select the down area...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about workflow design and how it can help you during your self-service analytics endeavors. Select a layout that meets your preferences, autosave your workflow to ensure all the new enhancements made are saved, and apply data profiling to gather information about your data quality. View which columns are looking good and not so good. Apply necessary updates to your data, as the better your data quality, the better your analysis. You also explored tips and tricks that are very handy. Browse results shows data results the way you want to see them and can be viewed without adding a Browse tool. You learned about structuring your data in tool containers to enable and disable as needed, providing clarity and optimization to your workflow. The tool alignment saves time by quickly aligning tools horizontally or vertically. The chapter capped off with time savers that will save you precious time to use on analysis, rather than updating and fixing your workflow...