Alteryx not reading input data correctly

[eaparsek]

Hi All, 

I'm currently having an issue with a large amount of data where when I load in the file, it shows an incorrect amount of rows and data within those rows. I first discovered this when I was generating a field summary of one of the columns of my data, and I found that data from other fields was being counted in that field summary. I had originally thought this was an issue with the frequency table tool, but I tried just viewing my data directly from the input, and the data displays incorrectly there as well. For example (I can't share any datasets directly due to privacy issues), there are a list of 80 possible values all in the format [1111-blank-blank].blank. I checked the file itself and the column only contains values in this format. Then when I look at the summary tab in Alteryx it shows a bunch of other random values as having a 1 count in this column, which is incorrect and was confirmed directly in the file. When I searched for these incorrect values in the file, they were values from different columns, the column in question in these cases still contained a valid correct value. Alteryx also reports having around more rows than the file actually has. I thought maybe it could be the special characters, so I removed them all, but the issue still persists. Are they any logic issues or Alteryx issues I could be overlooking here that could cause this issue? 

[Peachyco · Accepted solution]

Could very well be an issue of delimiters, especially if the delimiter character also serves as actual data (just like in apathetichell's example). It'd be tricky to devise a way around this without seeing the actual data. Maybe you can upload a modified dataset? With the sensitive data points transformed to maintain their format but the actual content changed. Like, the entry "Smith, John" is changed to "Last, First". Even just a couple of rows to give us a sense of what your records look like.

If data from different rows are being merged into one row in Alteryx, it's also likely that Alteryx can't properly identify the newline character in the file (the newline character usually sits at the end of the row to indicate that anything after it is a different row). Again, this can be tricky to resolve without seeing the actual data.