Alteryx Designer

Alteryx Designer is a very intuitive way to map out a process in a step by step visual workflow which can be then executed with the click of a button. Tedious manual tasks can be automated with ease. Traditionally, programming required drawing out ones algorithm in a flowchart and then having to translate that into computer code. With Alteryx, the flowchart itself is the code. It features a vast array of icons called tools, each of which has a specific function such as importing data, filtering based on criteria, summarizing, merging information and so forth. You simply drag and drop each tool into the work area for each step in your process and then click the play button. It's like having a robot to whom you can describe your work and then have it do it for you in a fraction of the time.

Alteryx Designer is excellent for data mining/wrangling for eventual output to be used for reporting but it's internal report generation and presentation tools are not as robust as others when it comes to publishing a polished presentation. I prefer to use Designer to produce my final data result set and export to Excel where I can then take advantage of Microsoft Office formatting and presentation options.

Not so steep learning curve, Alteryx is built around the human common sense. The fact that you can (View/Process) the data as a branch at any stage of the processing is really useful, and the way the software designed allows you to go backward and see what happened.

The limitation of some tools and the high barrier to developing new functionality.