Gauge Macro

Gauge.yxmc



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This is actually another old macro, but one which I never actually published on this blog.  It did however make a guest appearance in the Presidential Election App over on the Alteryx Public Gallery.

What Does it Do?

Well in that App it produces this part of the final report:

Showing the percentage of Republican or Democrat support for a given geographical area.  In general it produces a gauge giving a visual representation of a percentage field.  To use it you just add the macro to your canvas and give it some input data which contains a percentage field between 0 and 100.  For each row of your data it will generate a gauge visually showing the percentage.

You can also choose how big you want the gauge to be and customize the colors.

How Does it Work?

Now how it works it a little more interesting.  Does it use the work Ned has been doing on HTML visualizations? No.  Does it use the Run Command tool to call some external application to draw the gauge?  No.  It doesn't need to; we already have a tool in Alteryx which will let you draw things: The Report Map tool.  That's right the gauge and the arrow are actually a map!  Obviously not a map of anywhere physically, but made up of spatial objects created and manipulated by Alteryx and rendered by the Report Map tool.

Creating the spatial objects is the fun part and called upon some long ago learned trigonometry from my school days.  I'm not going to go into the exact details here, the macro is commented so download it and take a look at the details.

But I think you'll agree this opens up a whole world of creating custom reporting controls.  We are only limited by our spatial skills in Alteryx.

Improvements

One thing which could be better in the macro is the way you can choose colors.  At the moment you have to enter a hex format like #ff00ff.  Wouldn't it be great if there was a color picker question type that we could use in macros and apps?  How could I tell Alteryx what a great idea I think that would be I hear you ask?

Well that and any other great ideas that you have for product improvements to Alteryx can be submitted to the Alteryx Idea Center over at the Alteryx Community Site. (I would submit the idea myself, but feature requests carry more weight if they come from real customers ;-) )  But there are already some great ideas over there, so go join in the conversation!

Tableau Mapping Using Alteryx

Back in July Alteryx released Alteryx for Visual Analytics; a version of Alteryx Desktop specifically tailored
to deliver data natively to Tableau Software.  Since then I have begun to explore what Tableau is all about and in my opinion the two products are a beautiful pairing:  Alteryx allows you to do all of the preparation, heavy lifting, cleaning, blending and reformatting of your source data; and Tableau provides you with beautiful interactive visualizations and dashboards of that data.

One particular area that I looked into early on was the interactive mapping capabilities of Tableau.  You can create some great looking interactive maps in Tableau using a number of built in geocoding levels:

But what if your data isn't at one of those levels?  Well here I have to say a big thanks to +Craig Bloodworth a Tableau Zen Master from The Information Lab; a Tableau and Alteryx partner based here in the UK.  Craig has set up the website http://tableaumapping.bi/ where Tableau users can download spatial datasets for use in Tableau and he was kind enough to educate me in what format these files needed to be in.

Which for those of you interested is this:

Where each row is an ordered point in the outline of the polygon it is going to draw.  Effectively a dot-to-dot for Tableau to follow and render the polygons.

We quickly realized that creating this format using Alteryx would be straightforward using the spatial tools available and put together the below workflow to do just that:

Next step?  Wrap into a macro of course so we can reuse it time and time again by dragging a single tool to the canvas:

If you want the macro to use in your own modules you can download it here.

From there I decided it was time to contribute some mapping files to the site.  Using Wikipedia I quickly found a description of the Administrative Divisions of France and a quick Google search found an open source site where I could download the data (http://professionnels.ign.fr/geofla).  The only problem was that the site only contained four of the geographical levels listed on the Wikipedia page.  I was missing the highest geography level, Regions.  But the problem was quickly fixed when I realized the next level down (departments) included a region field, so I just used a summarize tool in Alteryx to summarize the departments into the Regions and problem solved:

From there it was just a case of selecting which fields I wanted on my output and getting the files off to Craig to publish.

On this coming Monday myself, Craig and +Allan Walker are challenging ourselves to see how many mapping datasets we can add to http://tableaumapping.bi/ in one day.  So if you have any requests for datasets you would like to see then let us know in the comments below or on twitter.  Follow our progress on Twitter during the day with the hashtag #tableaumapping.

Another New Alteryx Blog

As if one new Alteryx blog (inspiringingenuity.net) wasn't enough, there is now another Alteryx themed blog by no other than the reigning Alteryx Grand Prix Champion - Chris Love.

Check it out here http://sciolisticramblings.wordpress.com.

His latest blog post creates a bi-variate themed map macro using some great custom XML manipulation.

He also has some great posts on:

• Using Alteryx to compete in Kaggle competitions - http://sciolisticramblings.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/titanic-analysis-little-effort/

• Tableau - http://sciolisticramblings.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/tableau-its-not-excel-what-every-new-user-needs-to-know/; http://sciolisticramblings.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/exploring-food-hygiene-ratings/

• Building Interactive Html Maps - http://sciolisticramblings.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/building-interactive-html-maps-with-r-and-alteryx/

The interactive maps post makes use of some of the experimental work that Ned Harding (Alteryx's CTO) has being doing over on his blog around interactive charting.  If you haven't been following these posts I would highly recommend that you take a look.  He is just wrapping the series up so a great time to read the whole lot at once. http://inspiringingenuity.net/2013/11/11/alteryx-a-reusable-nvd3-macro/

Look out for a macro from me using some of his techniques coming soon...

New Blog on the Block

Well…  It has been a rather long time since I last posted on here…  Hopefully that is going to change.  But in the meantime if you are eager for some more Alteryx related blogging content, there is a new blog in town by Alteryx’s very own CTO Ned Harding.  (http://alteryxned.wordpress.com).  There has already been a number of great Alteryx related posts and also some more personal posts on teaching kids to program.

Alteryx highlight’s include:

• Reading XLSX Directly
• Ensuring fields are in a data stream (great for macro authoring)
• Dot Density Maps
• Weighted Median

And the August monthly round up is a great place to start too.

There is also a blog post about creating this rather beautiful satellite night style map (above right) showing UK demographic data.

Which brings me very nicely to a more personal announcement.  As long time followers of this blog will recall, I moved from the UK to Boulder, Colorado to work for Alteryx as a software developer.  Well I have now relocated back to the UK mainly because of this next picture.

No not "Big Data Analytics For Dummies".  (Although it is a great little publication and well worth a read.  If you haven’t already downloaded it already you can get a copy here).  But rather the model in the shot: my daughter Ida.  My wife and I thought with it being our first child it might be helpful to have free baby sitting, in the form of Grandparents, a little closer than a nine hour flight away!  So I am back in the UK, but very thankfully still working for Alteryx (I mean where else would I want to work?) and currently living in Cambridge:  Silicon valley of the UK as I like to tell my American friends.  (For anyone who has visited Silicon Valley and Cambridge, I think you will agree that there really is no need for further comment on the subject).

So if anyone feels like talking Alteryx or data (Or just joining some data minded people for a beer) you will find me a regular at the Data Insight’s meet ups in Cambridge http://www.meetup.com/Data-Insights-Cambridge/ (I say regular.  I’ve been to one and it was interesting enough that I’m going to the next one).

Look out for a post soon on the new layout features of Alteryx 8.5, which was rather current six months ago when I first wrote it and not so much now…  But hey it’s almost finished already and it gets me off to a rolling start…

Till then

Adam

Alteryx 7.0 - New Features Announced To Date

As I mentioned in my last post I think Alteryx 7.0 is going to be the most exciting release that I have seen (and that's not just because I have been working on it!)

I thought it would be worth a brief re-cap of the new features announced so far (complete with links to the Alteryx Engine Works blog):


Guzzler Improvements (link)
Some improvements to the core drive time engine in Alteryx's functionality offering: "which allows for more accurate drive time and drive radius calculations"

XML Parsing (link)
A feature that I know users have been asking for, for a long time.  Alteryx 7.0 sees XML support in the input tool along with a new XML parsing tool.

Alteryx web and the Private Cloud (link)
Alteryx 6.2 saw the release of Alteryx web On-Premise solution, another hugely exciting development for Alteryx. "It is an installable web application that allows end users to upload Alteryx wizards, manage users and run wizards all via a web browser." And being On-Premise clients can keep all of their data and modules secure on their on servers within their company.  Alteryx 7.0 promises more exciting features around "Permissions, Scheduling, Active Directory and viewing yxdbs and PCXML files."

Alteryx Map Changes (link)
This one is close to my heart as it is the main feature I have been working on since I joined Alteryx last February.  It is actually the second major re-write the mapping tool has seen and hopefully fulfills many of the requests we have received for mapping.

Input/Output Enhancements (link)
A new split button and latest used files gives you faster access to your files and database connections.  Plus the new Alias feature to manage your data connections and passwords.