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Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Designer Desktop experts.
Platform Product: Designer Issues – Working with Alteryx Customer Support Engineers (CSEs)
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This article details on the steps to read/extract password protected excel file in Alteryx Designer using the R code.
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Error "Timestamp is not close enough to the current server time" when running a workflow that contains an Oauth Macro in Alteryx Designer.
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This KB is extracted from the Inspire 2019 Tips + Tricks and outlines how to connect to a document library (Sharepoint) via Alteryx.
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This article addresses the replacement of PDF Input tool with the Image Input tool starting from 21.2 version of Alteryx Designer
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Error: "System.Data.OracleClient requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or greater" when connecting to Oracle.
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Sometimes large amounts of data can 'overwhelm' a tool or process in your workflow and make it appear like it is stuck or frozen.  This was the case recently when a user attempted to pass 7 million rows of data to a CASS tool.  Splitting these records into smaller chunks makes the process run much quicker. 
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When it comes to tools, Alteryx has a full box! With over 200 tools and macros in the basic installation, you may wonder how you'll master them all. Don't worry - we have 'apps' for that!
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This short, but packed demonstration will show you why tens of thousands of data analysts from more than 1,800 companies rely on Alteryx daily to prep, blend, and analyze data, to deliver deeper business insights in hours, not weeks.
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Analytic Starter Kits teach you how to prep, blend, and analyze your data faster than using tools like Excel or SQL coding; guide you through how to build sophisticated insights such as market basket analysis or predictive A/B testing; and show you how to output beautiful Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik or Salesforce Wave visualizations to explore and understand your data and insights.
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The new authentication and encryption settings allow IT departments to have much greater control over the email tool. The settings in themselves are a big step towards preventing spoofing, but there is one step that must still be done on the SMTP server itself.
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I like to share my way of adding a new tool to the canvas without using the mouse. It might prove useful to one or another keyboard addicted Alteryx hacker 😉
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Knock knock. Who's there? To. To who? Actually, it's To Whom.
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To get a better understanding of how to properly leverage a machine’s resources to use Alteryx, it can be very helpful to understand how the Alteryx Engine functions. To clear up any haziness surrounding the term “Alteryx Engine”, this article covers what happens when you click the Run Button
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Some Salesforce users do not use Salesforce Security Tokens. An accepted IP range can be set up instead in Salesforce Admin. This article will walk you through the steps to modify the Salesforce Output tool to be able to be used without a Salesforce Security Token.
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Procedures on how to configure Designer for input of large, zipped text files for processing.
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Select Tool fields show as missing & data types show unknown when querying from a database
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Alteryx is designed to use all of the resources it possibly can. In order to make Alteryx run as fast as possible, it tries to balance the use of as much CPU, memory, and disk I/O as possible.   The good news is that most of the resource utilization can be controlled. You can limit the amount of memory that is used on a system, user, or module level.   The Sort/Join memory setting is not a maximum memory usage setting; it’s more like a minimum. One part of Alteryx (sorts) that benefits from having a big chunk of memory will take that entire amount right from the start. It will be split between all the sorts in your module, but other tools will still use memory outside that sort/join block.  Some of them (e.g. drive times with a long maximum time) can use a lot.   If a sorting can be done entirely in memory, it will go faster than if we have to fall back to temp files, so that’s why it’s good to set this higher.  But if the total memory usage on the system pushes it into virtual memory, you’ll be swapping data to disk in a much less optimal way, and performance will be much worse and that’s why setting it too high is a bigger concern.   The Default Dedicated Sort/Join Memory Usage can be found in the Designer at Options > User Settings > Edit User Settings Best Practices on Memory Settings 32-bit machines*: Setting should be on the lower, conservative side. No matter how much actual RAM is there, only has at maximum 1 GB available, as soon as it is set higher, the machine will cross over into virtual memory and be unable to recover.   A 32-bit machine should never have a setting over 1000MB, and 512 is a good setting. Set it low (128 MB), especially when using Adobe products simultaneously with Alteryx. 64-bit machines: Set this in the system settings to half your physical memory divided by the number of simultaneous processes you expect to run.  If you have 8 GB of RAM and run 2 processes at a time, your Sort/Join memory should be set to 2GB. You might set it lower if you expect to be doing a lot of memory intensive stuff on the machine besides Alteryx   Set your Dedicated Sort/Join Memory Usage lower or higher on a per-module basis depending on the use of your computer, doing memory intensive non-sort work (i.e. large drive-times) then lower it, doing memory intensive sort-work then higher. *Please refer to this link for additional details on 32-bit support for Designer
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Copy:  Data can be copied directly from a Browse tool, just highlight the cells by clicking and dragging, much like you would in an old-fashioned spreadsheet.  In the top right hand corner of the Browse tool’s Properties, click on the “Copy to Clipboard” button, four choices will appear.  For this demonstration, we have chosen “Selected Cells with Headers”, the data is now copied to our clipboard.   Paste:  To paste the data into a module, try the technique mentioned above.  Simply right click on your canvas and click Paste. Bonus Thought: Suppose you are developing a large module, and you’ve employed Tool Containers as a part of your module’s design process.  How might you use the above method of copy/pasting data to eliminate the need to Run the completed portions of your module, but still supply data to downstream processes that you are working on? Answer: Place a Browse at the output of a completed Tool Container process; copy the contents of the Browse and paste them onto the Canvas as a Text Input.  Disable the Tool Container and use the Text Input as a substitute feed while you complete your module.
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Sometime it is difficult to locate a specific tool within a module.  It becomes especially difficult when your module grows very large, or when you’re reviewing a module built by someone else. The solution: Use the Find Tool feature. In any module, you can go to Edit > Find Tool... (as seen above) or simply right click on an empty portion of the module canvas.  Click on “Find Tool…”  This will open a new dialogue box with all the tools in the module listed by tool number.  Clicking the “Sort by Name” Link will re-order the tools alphabetically.  When a tool is chosen in the dialogue box, the tool is automatically selected and the properties window for that tool is opened.  If the tool name is known, it can be searched in the “Find Tool” box. This is a great feature in Alteryx that we made even better for 6.0.  In addition to searching for a tool name or user-specified name, you can also search tools for their content, or, like in the case of a Formula tool, parts of an expression.
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