Note - This post is published bit too late than it was written. I had it ready right after Aletryx training, but somehow forgot to publish.
Finally! Week after Christmas and New Year holiday, we started directly with Alteryx. 3 days training which I personally found really fun but challenging. Spoiler in the beginning, I loved Alteryx.
Last day of the training, we learned about macro. Macro a “reusable” workflow that encapsulates a set of tools and configurations. It sounds to me like a class in OOP.
Why do we need macro? Reusable, yes. Also, macros are used to automate and streamline repetitive tasks by allowing us to create a custom tool or set of tools with specific functionalities. In the real workflows where we import macros, macros looks like black box, which we feed with input and give us output.
There are 3 macros in Alteryx:
1. Standard macro
2. Batch macro
3. Iterative macro
As the name suggests, standard macro is used for standard cases. While, batch macro is for scenarios where we need to perform the same set of operations on multiple subsets of our data. As exercise, we calculated taxes from customer data using predefined tax rate per federal state from another table. In order to turn standard into batch macro, we have to use control parameter tool. Further, we can also argue to use join instead of macro, however, it is not suitable for complex workflow as it will clutter the workflow and make it unreadable as well as understandable.
While, iterative macro is used when we need to repeatedly apply a set of operations until a certain condition is met. It is really like while loop which we encountered in programming language. They also have the problem in common, namely unbreakable loop as we didn’t set the termination condition correctly.
It turned out that everyone in out cohort loves Alteryx (than Prep :P) and it is fun to solve the Alteryx weekly challenge.
Cheers,
Nuki