Embarking on your Einstein Analytics Journey? Start here!
I started my Einstein Analytics journey by coincidence in 2015. I was lucky that I got the opportunity to go to Paris and attend the Wave Brown Belt training, which was really interesting but some of it was a little over my head as everything was new to me. I took all the material, got a developer org with Wave enabled and started playing around. By the way Wave is what we now know as Einstein Analytics. Wave was new and documentation was limited, so most of my learnings have come from trial and error and of course some brilliant blog posts from Andrew Price. When I started getting the hang of it (and honestly a little bored) I thought it was worth letting others benefit from my learnings, so I started this blog, so other’s might get started with Einstein Analytics a little quicker. A lot has happened since 2015; the product has changed and the amount of information/documentation available has increased. But if you are completely new to Einstein Analytics where should you start?
Beginning of your journey
As I said there is so much more information now than in 2015, which makes it hard to know where to start and what to move on to. The very first thing I would do is create an Einstein Analytics developer org. Regardless if you have Einstein Analytics in the company I would still get a developer org to test out your crazy ideas, that are bound to come.
Next step is to head to trailhead and get going with two trails:
Once those trails are completed, the next must feature to explore is compare tables. They are great if you want to do basic as well as advanced calculations and they quickly take your dashboards to the next level. Have a look at these blogs to be inspired by the many possibilities with compare tables:
- Einstein Analytics: Calculation without Code
- YTD Comparison with Compare Tables
- Rolling Aggregation with Compare Tables
- And you must check out Carl Brundage blog and app on compare tables
Finally, I will at this point strongly encourage you to join the Salesforce Einstein Analytics trailblazer community and ask any questions you have – it’s honestly the best community!
Taking your journey further
Once you have completed the trailheads you are ready to take things a little further and use that Command+E or Ctrl+E, so I would recommend moving on to bindings! It’s the way where you can bind steps together for different purposes and outcomes. So login to your developer org and install the Einstein Analytics Learning Adventure App from the App Exchange. To get a review of the app, make sure to check out the review by Peter Lyons. Once installed try some of the use cases in the app.
Another thing that demands bindings is static steps, which I always use in my dashboard in one form or another because they can simplify your dashboard but yet make them incredibly powerful. So have a look at these blog posts:
- The Power of Static Steps
- Using date fields in static steps
- And since date fields can act like the middle child you may also want to read the Hack for Date Groupings in Static Steps
Once you have static steps conquered it’s time to move on to dataflow and here I can only recommend to look at Peter Lyons’ Dataflow Basics series. And if you want to handle those null values this blog might also be a nice one to remember for the dataflow modeling.
Other must bookmark resources
I have a lot of other blog posts on Einstein Analytics that have different use cases described in details, so have a look around. I keep posting new content, so if you like what I write then feel free to come back (if you want a notification when I post new content, then sign up to the right – or in the bottom if you are reading this on your mobile). Anyway, I rely on a bunch of content by others, here is a selection of things I have bookmarked and use. I can only recommend you to bookmark them as well:
- Einstein Analytics Learning Adventure with quick links to anything Einstein Analytics
- The two Einstein Analytics masters Peter Lyons’ YouTube channel and Carl Brundage’s blog
- JSON Online to quickly modify or view JSON. Yes, you should also get something like Sublime or Notepad++
- Einstein Analytics Tech Lounge Recordings, you can find a lot of interesting but a little unstructured information here.
- Einstein Analytics SAQL Reference, when you start getting a bit more advanced.
- How to handle common Date challenges in Einstein Analytics, well the title says it all right?
I guess all there is left for me to say is enjoy your Einstein Analytics Journey. And let me know if you think I missed anything or anyone.
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Also check out the appexchange package from Salesforce Labs : https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000DoLB3UAN
I agree! Good for learning bindings!