Building formulas off Text Input

azimme10

Hi, 

I fairly new to Alteryx.  I am trying to build a forecasting workflow where I trend actual data over a set period of time.  I created a text input to enter the number of weeks I am forecasting, and I want to be able to reference this input in formulas to trend out data over the number of weeks entered in the text input.  How can I reference the weeks entered in the text input in the Formula tool?  Or is there another formula I should be using instead?

Thank you.

Claje

Hi,

Yes this is possible

I've mocked up an example in two screenshots, one with a modified version of your Text Input tool (2 columns, and I renamed them) and one of the flow (I didn't write any formulas here:

Text Input tool. I moved the second value into a new column, and renamed them for ease of useSame as your flow, but I added the Append Fields tool to the workflow, which will add our new columns to each record

Once you have made these two changes, just update your formulas so that instead of using ([Column]/4)*52, you use ([Column]/[Currentweeks])*[TotalWeeks]

Essentially, replace all of your "4" values with [Currentweeks] and all of your "52" values with [TotalWeeks].

You probably don't want Currentweeks and Totalweeks in your final output.  I'd recommend using a Select tool at the end of all of this to remove these two fields.