How to: Print documents with a physical printer using Alteryx

[AlexEntz]

Dear Alteryx Community,

at a recent event with @grossal, @DavidSta and @VianneyM an interesting question came up: “Can you print files directly via Alteryx?”. At the time we could only figure out workarounds, like sending an email to the printer.

I am happy to announce that after two weeks of coding, testing and (mostly) playing around with the Python SDK I managed to create an Alteryx tool that lets you print files via the default printer of your system. The tools only input is one field containing the full file path. Note: This tool only works on windows machines, the file types I tested were word, excel and pdf. Image files do not work!

This was not possible with a normal macro, since the underlying python code does not execute correctly inside of a macro, but inside of a Python SDK it works like a charm!

Please feel free to contact me if any questions arise and/or if you want to help develop this tool further. The next step for me will be to incorporate a way to choose the printer inside the tool (the code is already written I only have to make it work within the SDK) and find a solution for image files (should not be a big deal).

Best Regards,

Alexander Manuel Entz

Helpful Resources for SDK development I used:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Science/Levelling-Up-A-Beginner-s-Guide-to-the-Python-SDK-in-A... by @NickJ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TZfIbWnyoQ

[ddiesel]

Very clever! I don't currently have a use case for this, but I'm putting it in my back pocket. Thank you.