6 Steps to Quicker Data Blending for Power BI using Alteryx

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Power BI empowers analysts to deliver incredible data-driven insights and visualizations to their organizations. As decision-makers recognize the value of visual analytics produced in Power BI, analysts must find ways of dealing with the increasing volumes and complexity of the data required to get to these insights. Unfortunately, this is a critical and often time-consuming process. A lot of time spent revolves around blending and preparing data from multiple sources to create an actionable analytic dataset.

Hence, this forces analysts to spend weeks dealing with:

• Wasted time waiting for others to get them the right data for their analysis
• Manual preparation and integration of different data sets
• A lack of an easy way to incorporate advanced analytics that many decisions require

Analysts need to get to data-driven insights as fast as possible because speed to insight is key in today’s business environment. Therefore, there are many companies, like Alteryx, focusing on enabling and empowering analysts to get data prepared, analyzed, and visualized rapidly by providing them with advanced self-service data analytics capabilities. With Alteryx analysts can blend multiple sources of data in a single intuitive workflow, with no programming or coding required, and go from spending weeks to just a few hours to create the perfect dataset for Power BI visualization.

In a few simple steps, Alteryx enables analysts to:

1. Easily get data from the data sources needed for analysis
2. Quickly cleanse data to remove outliers, duplicate data, and other data noise
3. Optimize the data for visualization by moving rows to columns, renaming fields, and enriching data where needed
4. Seamlessly join the specific data required from all the different types of sources
5. Transform data so that it is ready for analysis without having to use manual formulas or programming
6. Output dataset directly to Power BI so more time can be spent on analysis and visualization

If you're interested in learning more, then check out this cookbook to find out how you can get to richer dashboards and reports in Power BI by spending less time blending data for your visualizations.