More and more data is generated every day from a variety of sources: weather, road traffic, internet searches, social networks, emails, photos, videos, and more. According to 10 Marketing Trends for 2017 by IBM, internet users generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, on average.
Making sense out of massive amounts of data is a complicated task. This is where data analytics comes to our aid.
The Business Problem
The problem with “outside” data is that it’s often not easily accessible. It usually involves interacting with not-so-friendly APIs and massive, complicated databases.
At Keyrus, we perform a variety of data analyses both internally and externally. Internally, we analyze employee allocations, budgets, billing, and more. Externally, we create solutions for clients who need to analyze their business processes, sales trends and seasonality, and other variables or business questions.
Effective data analysis necessitates knowing what is happening in the world and how it impacts the business. Google Calendar is a vast public storehouse of events that can be used for descriptive analytics and more advanced analytics, such as predictive and prescriptive. If the business can automate the data extraction from Google Calendar, analysis becomes much easier and more powerful.
Our Solution: Retrieve Calendar Alteryx Workflow
In order to utilize this time dimension in a simple and friendly way, we developed an Alteryx analytical app that retrieves any Google public calendar using its ID. Alteryx is a powerful platform for data blending and advanced analytics. The app downloads and parses calendar ical files from the Google Calendar API.
Benefits
Retrieve any public Google calendar – just get the calendar ID and you’ll be able to download it.
Select dates – the workflow interface enables date selection in case only a specific time frame of events is needed.
Easy setup - it only takes a few simple steps to install and configure the authentication tool to be able to authenticate to Google Calendar API.
Fast data fetch – it just takes a few seconds to retrieve the calendar file.
Can be configured to load directly into file/db – you can get the result in any type of file or integrate it directly to your other workflows, db, or any other tools.
How to Get the Workflow
You can download the app from the Alteryx public gallery.
Full instructions are embedded in the app. You can also find them here.