Automatically skip unneeded rows and set headers

[faresghnaim]

Hi guys,

Hope that you're all doing well!

I have a bunch of excel files that I want to add to my workflow 1 by 1. I am inputting them in a batch macro however I am running into an issue, some files have unneeded rows at the start as seen below (this is not the actual data)

Some files have 4 rows and some have 3 and others do not have any unneeded rows.

My question is, is there anyway where I could automatically detect these rows for all the files and skip them to start from the data I want?

I was thinking maybe we could use the functionality of COUNTA on Excel if it can be mirrored on Alteryx.

Any suggestion is welcome.

Thanks a bunch!

[CharlieS · Accepted solution]

Hi @faresghnaim 

I'm sure we can figure out a systematic way to determine how many rows should be skipped. In the attached example, I relied on the identity that the first field, [Field1], would be empty for the rows I wanted to skip. Once a non-empty [FIeld1] was found, I include all subsequent rows. This expression was built into a Multi Row Formula tool, then a Filter tool removed the unneeded records. 

Check it out and let me know if this helps. 

[faresghnaim]

Thank you very much @CharlieS  this was extremely helpful!