I’d like to say a big Thank you! to everyone that came to my session at Alteryx Inspire today! I always enjoy having the opportunity to attend these conferences and chat with everyone about their data. Unfortunately, 45 minutes is just not a long enough amount of time to cover all the really cool aspects and techniques you can accomplish with the Alteryx download tool.

So, I decided to go ahead and provide you with additional resources for you to really learn how to use Alteryx! Attached you will find all the workflows I used during my presentation at Inspire 2017 along with some extra goodies that I didn’t get a chance to cover during the session.

In the HTML parsing workflow you will see a section that illustrates how to download web images using BLOB tools. Additionally, I’ve turned the JSON parse workflow into an application that allows you to get a weather forecast simply by choosing a location on a map. You will, however, need to enter your free Wunderground API key into the workflow, because the one imbedded for the presentation will be disabled.

If you have any questions, feel free to stop by the InterWorks booth in the Hall of Analytics. 

Download the files here: /wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/InterWorks_Inspire2017.zip

Scraping Web Data with Alteryx

Session Description:

Have you ever needed to pull data from a website and been frustrated by the lack of a download button or an API? Public data is available on every website you visit, and all it takes to scrape that data is a URL and some Alteryx magic. Using Alteryx, you can bring public website data directly into your workflows—without copying and pasting. In this session, we’ll cover the Alteryx download tool, parsing tools and batch macros.

Content:

Getting data from the web can be challenging. Often times, the data you seek is accessible only through an API or embedded inside HTML. APIs and web scraping are powerful tools once you learn to wield them. With Alteryx, you don’t have to know how to code to get the data you need. Use the download tool to gather web data and parse it using the powerful data shaping tools in Alteryx.