Advent of Code is back! Unwrap daily challenges to sharpen your Alteryx skills and earn badges along the way! Learn more now.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Reporting Tools and very wide Excel output

nickdreach
9 - Comet

I'm using Alteryx to create a pivot-table like output, which ends up in Excel.  With a daily column for the last two full years plus the current year it is some 800 columns wide.  If we use the Output Data tool, we can write straight to a .xlsx file without issue - other than the fairly raw look of it..

So, I've made multiple attempts to leverage the various Reporting tools, (Table, Visual Layout, Render, Layout) to allow a better visual output.  While I can appy any number of rules and formatting without issue, what I am unable to do is get the resultant spreadsheet to go beyond column 'YZ' in Excel.  On opening the spreadsheet, I'm greeting with the error:

'We found a problem with some content in pivot test.xlsx.  Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can?  If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes'

On clicking Yes, I see a dialogue box:

'Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content.  Remove Records: Cell information from /xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml part'

 

If I zip the file up and investigate the referenced xml file I can see a set of xml tags along these lines:

<c r="A1" s="1"/>

<c r="B1" s="2"/>

<c r="C1" s="2"/>

...this continues in line with the names of the Excel columns until we get beyond YZ:

 

<c r="YX1" t="s" s="2"><v>2</v></c>

<c r="YY1" t="s" s="2"><v>2</v></c>

<c r="YZ1" t="s" s="2"><v>2</v></c>

<c r="PZA1" t="s" s="2"><v>2</v></c>

<c r="PZB1" t="s" s="2"><v>2</v></c>

 

So instead of seeing references to ZA1, ZB1 etc....there is PZA1, PZA2 etc.  This continues for the 26 columns ZA to ZZ then resets itself correctly (AAA1, AAB1 etc)

 

This is screaming bug to me.  If I go and look in column PZA onwards - there are the missing columns!

I know I could opt to read the .xlsx back in, remove the offending columns and save.  Or even read the .xlsx file produced via the Output Data tool back in and apply formatting to it.

 

I'm actually more interested in getting this fixed and knowing if anyone else has ever seen such a thing.  2022.1.1.42604 for what it is worth!

5 REPLIES 5
oyes704
6 - Meteoroid

Hi Nickdreash,

bug or not - a sample workflow to replicate/investigate would be extremely helpful!

Thank you,

Oly

nickdreach
9 - Comet

See attached - couldn't be much simpler....the Render output gives you an error - say Yes and you can view the temporary file output....but only up to column YZ.....then a massive gap until PZA....

nickdreach
9 - Comet

I've raised a case with a support - easy to recreate, hopefully even easier to fix!

nickdreach
9 - Comet

Alteryx support confirm this is a defect.

nickdreach
9 - Comet

Alteryx Support:


This defect (TCPE-735) has been addressed/resolved in version of 2023.2 of Alteryx Designer.




Labels