Introduction

Aim of this book

In this book, we provide guidance on how to write 30 or so common calculations in each of the following tools: Excel, Tableau, Alteryx, OrgVue, tSQL, Python.

The audience is analysts, consultants and data scientists who may be familiar with one or more of the tools listed. You will hopefully find it useful if you want to:

Get an introduction to the key calculations you should master as a regular user of data
Refresh your memory of how to write specific functions
Translate an expression you know in one tool into the syntax used by another tool

It's written clearly and concisely with explanations of each calculation, model syntax, worked examples and user notes to help explain certain things.

Directly informed by our experience in consulting, analytics and technology, we hope this serves as both an induction manual for new analysts and a reference guide for experienced users.

What do I need to know?

We assume you have some basic knowledge of when to use certain expressions, so although each expression has an example and may contain additional notes, extensive explanations and use cases aren't provided.

We also assume you are roughly aware of basic data types. Below is a quick summary:

Data Type

Notes

Measure

Integer (incl. various bytes) Decimal (incl. Float, Double, Fixed)

Dimension

String (incl. variations e.g. VString, Wstring, Char etc.)

Temporal

Date (incl. Time and DateTime)

Bool

Boolean (True/False)

Image

Image XML (64bit)

NB. Different tools can be more or less strict about handling different data types, and most will let you change types through the UI as well as with a conversion expression.