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2018.1 Release - Usability of Excel Features in New Input Tool

frankm
5 - Atom

Dear team & community,

 

The release note for Alteryx Designer 2018.1 states that "we have enhanced the Input Data tool to improve the usability of excel features". Unfortunately I am currently not able to update to 2018.1 yet (company license), but I was wondering what the changes include since this could impact some of the solutions we are currently working on. I didn't find the detailed information anywhere on the support or community pages, does anyone know where I can find it?

 

Thank you and kind regards

 

Frank

11 REPLIES 11
DanM
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team

@frankm,

 

Really the change is a visual UI change to connecting to Excel. Really no other Excel features added. The ability to choose your sheet name is less confusing, if your worksheet has named ranges enabled you are able to pull that information, and a list of sheet names.

 

Dan

frankm
5 - Atom

Hi Dan

 

Thanks for the quick response! The RangeName list is good news, although I was hoping for some more fancy updates re Excel integration :).

 

Cheers

 

Frank

DanM
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team

@frankm If there is something you are looking for that we don't do already, please feel free to add it to the Ideas page.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/idb-p/product-ideas

Inactive User
Not applicable

What about the SQL Editor? It seem unavailable for Excel files.

 

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frankm
5 - Atom

Are you sure the editor is missing? Looks more like you need to refer to an existing Excel file first before you can access the editor.

FFFool
9 - Comet

Maybe this was in 11.5 or 11.8 as I didn't upgrade to those, but new since 11.3 is the ability to input and output .xlsb files, which is massive for our company, as we were using a Macro I created that called batch files to convert to .xlsb before, and it wasn't necessarily stable. 

DanM
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team

@FFFool

 

We do now read and write to .xlsb files. You can see all the file formats Alteryx can use here. https://help.alteryx.com/current/index.htm?_ga=2.213973266.403253465.1522008027-1960283514.152061768...

FFFool
9 - Comet

@DanM

 

Yes, I'm aware(and very stoked about it!). The question was what new Excel Functionality there is with 2018.1. Just informing that is one of the new things(to me, at least).

frankm
5 - Atom

Thats good news indeed, will help to get rid of some annoying script/vba interfaces to turn .xlsb into .xlsx. Thanks for the heads up! I was mostly hoping for some new ways to interact with Excel, e.g. trigger calculations or feed inputs into an open file. Our goal is to efficiently integrate an Excel engine in an Alteryx workflow to perform certain calculations that are too cumbersome to set up in Alteryx. The solution I came up with so far is neither performing very well nor is it particularly stable (saving intermediary results in a Temp .xlsx file, trigger vbscript to load temp data into engine, calculate and output results into another temp .csv file). But let's see, I guess it's only a matter of time until someone in the community comes up with a more elegant solution to this problem :).

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