Why does Cross Tab substitute underscores for punctuation characters, even for blanks.

I have two columns, one is Name, another is Value.

Name	Value
Loan Cross Ref	12345678

When it is transformed by Cross Tab, the field names based on the Name changed to be "Loan_Cross_Ref", by adding this underscore between each word. This is annoying as it always failed in the Join tool following since the field in another file is coming as Loan Cross Ref.

So I am trying to understand the design logic of adding this underscore. As for temp solution, I have to use a select tool right after the Cross Tab to rename the field.

Developer

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Accepted answers

Qiu

@JokeFun
It seems this is not a "bug", rather than a compromising between speed and formatting.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Cross-Tab-Tool-Removes-spaces-and-special-characters-and-adds/td-p/715276

Go to above link and find below paragraph for the explaination and workaround. ‌‌

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Pro Tip: Renaming Fields

A downside of the Cross Tab tool is that it doesn't play nice with special characters in field headers, including spaces. This means that if you have a field header "a a", it will actually come out as "a_a". I know this can be a bit inconvenient, but when we were developing the Alteryx engine we prioritized speed and efficiency over keeping the field headers looking nice. Don't worry though - there's a perfectly doable solution to this problem (more than one actually! ) that makes use of an awesome tool called Dynamic Rename . This is the way I usually like to go about it:
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All comments

MarqueeCrew

Hopefully Alteryx can help all of us out and this can be enhanced.

Qiu

@JokeFun
It seems this is not a "bug", rather than a compromising between speed and formatting.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Cross-Tab-Tool-Removes-spaces-and-special-characters-and-adds/td-p/715276

Go to above link and find below paragraph for the explaination and workaround. ‌‌

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro Tip: Renaming Fields

ckelley0

it does seem like a bug

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