Create/Update multiple template files

[blessonmatthew]

Hello,

Can anyone please help me with creating multiple template files using Alteryx Solution. How it goes about it is, we have 10-20 folks in a team. Each one of them is suppose to update a template every month which has their name and few other details mentioned on it. Usually we use to manually change the dates and Name every month.

Is there a way to create a workflow which could get me the separate excel file for each team member. I have attached 2 template herewith and have marked the fields in yellow which needs to be updated. Further i have added a list which specifies the name of folks in the team and year/month we are referring to. We need a file for each person mentioned on the list with the file name specifying the members name.

Kindly let me know if its possible.

[DanielG · Accepted solution]

@blessonmatthew -- I'd suggest reading up on the Blob Tools.  They were a life changer for me when I was in need of doing something similar to you.  @NicoleJ  wrote this article and it is great.  https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/The-Blob-Reporting-That-Isn-t-From-a-Horror-Film/bc-p/...

You need to create some named ranges in the one template file then you should be able to use something like this attached file. 

Personally I prefer to dump the raw data to other sheets and use VBA to move it around in Excel, but that is much more complicated and you have to know VBA... 😀 

[DanielG]

Also if you could receive data automatically from HR or a feed of some sort, so you dont have to maintain a list of employees yourself, then you can schedule this to run monthly on the server and it will only create files for active people.  Also, I took some liberties with month/year creation, as I assume you'd be preparing these for upcoming months and not looking back at prior months...  Hope it helps at least get the ideas flowing.  Good luck.

[blessonmatthew]

Thank you Daniel for your response and input. Let me give it a try. Will let you know how it goes. :)

[DanielG]

@blessonmatthew No problem.  This stuff is fun.  😀 

Hopefully that works good for you.  Or at least it is a good start for you to build out your ideas with.  Update in here to let me know how it goes.

[blessonmatthew]

Hello Daniel, Good Day.

The work flow is showing me an error stating cannot access the file. I think you might have added some template for the Blob input tool. Kindly let me know which file did you add?

[DanielG]

Hi,

Sorry I thought the template file got packaged in the zip.  😀

It is basically the same as yours, I just added the 5 named ranges to the sheet.

[DanielG]

You might need to re-establish the file references as I don't know how likely it is that they will reside in the same location as the workflow once you have built out what you need.  Hopefully this gets you where you need to go.  

[blessonmatthew]

It worked and is awesome. Exactly what i was looking for. Thank you very much Daniel, made my day😀

However its creating few extra sheets, is there a way to delete the sheet once the purpose is done?

[DanielG]

Awesome!  Not sure where you are seeing extra sheets though?  I just ran it locally (where the workflow the list and the template are all stored in the same folder and I get 6 files output and they look like this:

Here are the 6 output names I am getting.