Daily email of a preformatted (in Excel) PDF

[JoeCat]

I see ways to render a pdf from report views.  However Alteryx reporting isnt quite as robust as I'd want. 

Today, I'm using Alteryx to populate some data tables into an excel file where that excel is then rendering a few different views of that data on one tab that is on sharepoint.    I can get that far.

I'm beginning to think the answer might live outside of Alteryx, but what are some approaches on exporting that excel to a pdf and it being picked up emailed every day.  

[KGT · Accepted solution]

So... you want to export to excel, use Excel to format the data into an Excel report tab. Then create a pdf off that and have Alteryx email it?

You could co-ordinate it through Alteryx, but there may be other ways outside of Alteryx as not much of this is happening in Alteryx. This is not a natural function of Alteryx, and so you'll be using R/Python/Run Command.

I highly recommend looking further into the reporting tools. They are actually quite powerful, it just takes a bit to learn them. And they are modular.

• Populate Excel: Easy through Output Tool
• Call a macro in Excel to execute the rendering: Either Run Command, R Tool or Python Tool. You'll find posts on the community for this. You can pick what works for you and customise.
• Convert to pdf: There are functions to do this. In Python it would be FPDF (PHP port and so HTML friendly for formatting) or something like that.
• Send email: Somehow have Alteryx know that is all completed and then pass the filename to the email tool.

[JoeCat]

Thanks.  I somewhat expected (that without reporting tool) the solution might live outside of Alteryx in terms of the file handling.  I'll explore reporting further.  Thanks for the feedback.