ACAW case studies
ACAW · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The ACAW (Alteryx Certified Advanced Workflow Specialist) is a vendor credential aimed at analysts who already build Alteryx workflows fluently and want to demonstrate deeper design skill rather than basic tool familiarity. It suits practitioners who regularly blend messy multi-source data, write non-trivial expressions, build macros and analytic apps, and tune workflows that other people depend on. The ACAW case studies are 5 cases and about 3,051 words.
1Joining Two Weekly Extracts with Mismatched Keys
A retail analyst receives two files every Monday. sales.csv has 1.2M rows with a store code field like 0142 , 0143 , and 0207 (always 4 digits, zero-padded, stored as text).
632 words, about 3 min2A Chained Workflow That Runs Overnight and Sometimes Fails
A team maintains a workflow that runs at 02:00 via Alteryx Scheduler. It reads a 4GB Parquet file, runs three joins, writes a summary CSV, and then emails the file.
670 words, about 3 min3A Running Total That Resets and Skips Nulls
An analyst has transaction data sorted by account id then txn date , with a amount field that contains nulls (about 3% of rows) and occasional negative adjustments. They need a running balance per account that: (1) resets to zero at each new account, (2) treats null amounts as zero for the running total but preserves the null in the output, and (3) produces a final balance per account for a summary.
511 words, about 3 min4Predictive Scores That Look Great in Training
A marketing team builds a churn model in Alteryx on 18 months of customer data (~90,000 customers). They split 70/30 into train/validation, fit a logistic regression, and see 94% accuracy on validation.
595 words, about 3 min5An Analytic App That Breaks on Certain Inputs
A team publishes an Analytic App that lets users pick a region from a dropdown, choose a date range, and optionally upload a CSV of overrides. The app runs a workflow and outputs a PDF.
643 words, about 3 min