Friday, September 28, 2012

Customer Tips From... Scott Alessandro (MIT - Sloan School of Management)

The third edition of our customer tips series is brought to you by Scott Alessandro, Associate Director of Sloan Educational Services at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Scott is a long-time and avid Veera user who has been very creative with his applications of the software. Here are his tips: 

1. You are able to remap your data files by clicking on the connection icon either under the connections menu or in the job on the actual file. When I first started using Veera, I was afraid to move files around as it would break connections. Now I know better.  


2. Use the Find DeDup or Remove Dup node when you are working with a data file for the first time. You will be surprised how often duplicate records exist in data files (well, really we should not be surprised, but sometimes are).

3. With the output node, you can check or uncheck the columns you want to include. This is especially useful when you are using transform or merge nodes. I like to keep all of the columns throughout my job and then only select out the relevant ones in the output node. Helps you to keep track of what you are doing within a job (especially also if you create a ‘test’ output you move around the job).

4. Use ‘Set Run Order’ when you have multiple outputs in a job or a job that relies on one output to run another output. Akin to that, in the Merge node, you can also change the order that files are merged together by right clicking on the file number. Since I like to merge a lot of different files together, it is useful to be able to change the merge order especially if you add files later. 


5. Right click on a job to make a copy and then paste it onto the workspace.

6. In Cleanse, can multi-select columns and run the same type of cleanse, rather than selecting each column individually. 
7. Use the Rename node to re-order columns.

...Have tips of your own? Email them to caitlin.garrett@rapidinsightinc.com!

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