Pivoting on contents of (comma separated) data in fields?

Question

Hello #AlteryxFam!

I was provided with a large number of just over 256 Profit and loss accounts for 256 branches of a business, each one in seperate tabs of an Excel spreadsheet: one tab for each one branch.

I have (successfully!) extracted the financial KPIs I needed to out of that haystack and enjoyed the thrill of solving! But I thought I'd reflect back on the hackerish way I solved it and think if there's a more elegant way of solving this.

I got really acquainted with the "Cache and Run Workflow" command (256 tabs takes ~ 256 seconds to process, yuck), used an Input Data tool to extract the tab names I wanted, fed it in to a Dynamic Input tool to grab the tabs as a single data frame, then used a Formula and a Multi-Row Formula to add a column with the original name of the tab as the data source to every row (helpfully, the tab name was replicated on the tab itself as the first cell). I extracted the data in a format suitable for Tableau and ran it in Tableau. Which is fine for Tableau.

But I'm thinking I may need to provide the dataset in Excel for other users, the shape of the data is something like this:

I have the stores going in sequential order across the top in Columns,

and the account names in the Rows.

Each cell I have data that represents: ThisMonth, ThisQuarter, ThisYear.

But I want to extract the data from within the (comma separated) cells AND to rename the columns to reflect the dimensions of the data

So I ought to get

Store-01-ThisMonthStore-01-ThisQuarterStore-01-ThisYear ThisMonthThisQuarterThisYearRevenue1003001200Costs-30-90-180Gross Profit702101020Overheads-50-150-500EBITDA2060520

any thoughts? I attach a workflow with dummy data.

Pivoting on contents of (comma separated) data in fields.yxmd

T_Willins · Accepted Answer

Hi @izamryan,

The attached workflow gives you the output you are looking for (except for the 2nd row, which looked redundant to the field names, but can be added at the end if needed).  This workflow is dynamic to allow for all accounts in rows and all stores (3 fields each).