Manipulate data manually

Question

Hello

I'm new to Alteryx. I'm trying this tool to see if it is possible to introduce a step that will allow business analysts to manually manipulate data within a workflow.

Here is the detailed scenario: We have business analysts who export data from a report into an Excel spreadsheet and manually do adjustments in the Excel and publish it for further processing of this data. What we want is to enable the user to extract the data from database, run some aggregations and display this data to the business analyst in editable mode. The analyst would then adjust certain fields from the output and submit. The workflow should continue further and load the modified data into database.

Please suggest.

Regards.

pedrodrfaria · Answer

Hi @nirajb

What you can do is use the chained application logic. The first WF will output to an excel file and then the user can open it, make the changes and the second WF will only begin when the user clicks to move to the next WF. The second WF uses this same excel file as Input (either automatically or manually).

This way you have a chained app that allows in between WFs the user to manually update anything you may want him to update.

nirajb · Answer

Hi Ben,

Thanks much for your suggestions.

I looked into the chained application approach, however I did not find any custom app interface that can display data in tabular format and allow user to edit the data displayed in the table. Also I was looking into saving the intermediate data into Alteryx database format, however that also does not allow data to be edited.

Regards,

Niraj

BenMoss · Answer

Hi!

The task can be approached in two ways, the first way, which is a bit clunky, is to create two workflows, the first one that generates the ‘intermediate file’ which would probably be an Excel output if you want your user to edit it, the 2nd workflow then consumes the edited file and produces your desired output. The user would have too open the two workflows themselves.

The process above is probably best if you believe the edits made by your users aren’t quick, and they would close Alteryx down in the mean time.

An alternative approach, which gives a soother experience, is to create a chained application, this would work in the same kind of style as above, but the user is presented with an interface and when the user hits ‘next’ on the interface the 2nd application will automatically be triggered (so to the user it looks like a single process, but under the hood it’s still two separate pieces).

I’d advise you do some research on chained apps and you should be able to quickly see how they would be useful in this case.

Thanks

Ben