Hello,
An old project
I had a project where I am given a large data set, and I had to count things in it so that an audit team to put values into a compliance report.
Some values I need might look like this (this is completely made up):
Value 1: How many widgets were:
- manufactured after 2020
- origin of manufacture was Arizona, California, Nevada
- shipped to distribution center
Value 2: How many widgets were:
- manufactured after 2020
- origin of manufacture was New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Colorado
- shipped to distribution center
Value 3: How many widgets were:
- manufactured after 2020
- origin of manufacture was not in the South West
- shipped to distribution center
Note: this would be a sum/difference of Value 1 and Value 2 and a third value calculated elsewhere.
I did the work using a series of Filter Tools and Summarize Tools, it's not very complicated.
This graphic below represents a logical mockup of the data split/group/count points of a branch in an actual workflow, take note of the 5 numbered data points:
A new project
So I've been tasked with doing some further filtering + summarizing. Let's say that there is a new field I want to add to the mix, and this field has 6 different values I need to split and count on, it would look something like this:
Note that there are two scenarios here:
1. on the left side of the branch, 6 new fields were inserted between data points 2 and 4/5. This has effectively increased the number of data points I need to create by 12 (6 new fields * 2 fields beneath it)
2. On the right side of the branch, there are going to be 6 new data points.
My problem
This example above is a small sample of the fields I'm working with. My actual workflow has dozens of these filter/summarize combinations in it, it's already unwieldy. Adding more fields and values to filter/summarize on is going to make it an enormous Workflow. Just a mental calculation has it that I'll need somewhere in thousands of little filter/summarize combinations.
No one has time for that!
My question
Is there a better way to do this? I feel like the way I've been going about this is a brute-force 'work harder, not smarter' solution. I was wondering if maybe there is something like a dynamic way to create these filter/summarize combinations in a Workflow...something like an iterative macro where I can feed in a data set, and a list of filter/summarize combinations I need. Or maybe a better technique, something which is more intelligent than just manually splitting and counting the results.
Thank you,
Nick
