Best Practices?

[Cadistra]

Hello all,

I'm very new to Designer and currently trying to get my certification. I've been studying really hard and doing as many practice exercises as I can, and I'm teaching myself everything all by myself. 

I was wondering if I would be able to get some assistance/advice/tips on a certain way to parse something. 

Say I have a dataset that I need to find a specific thing out of a group of records - eg. an entire column of years for NYBS book titles, and one column has 30+ books in one year for each year. I'll attach images too to show. 

Basically, I know what I need to do, but my method of going about it is clunky, time-consuming and not practical.  I got the answer I needed, but I would love any advice on how to make this easier! I feel like I've tried every combination of Transpose, Cross-Tab and Summarize, but clearly there's something I'm missing/not understanding. I just want to understand what I'm doing wrong, why it's wrong, and better practices to go about it.

Thank you all in advance. 

(For the image - I needed the highest grossing product from each year, so I used a bunch of filter tools to, well, filter out each year by itself, then a summarize on each of those to find the highest, then combined them all via the Union tool. )

[IraWatt · Accepted solution]

Hey @Cadistra,

Think your looking for something like this:

The workflow groups by year getting the the maximum value for products sold. Then the join tool joins on year and number sold allowing us to get the books name back. If two books came through because they had the same number sold you could add a final sample tool in which you group by year, but only get the first element.

Hope that makes sense,

Ira

[Cadistra]

!!!! It worked perfectly!!

Thank you SO MUCH! This makes things way easier! 

I really appreciate it! 

(Actually, I am curious - how come changing the date to Int32 allowed it to work like this? I would have kept on trying to remove the comma and changed it to a Date data type, but I have a feeling it would have been more trouble than it's worth. )

[IraWatt]

No worries @Cadistra XD

The issue with dates would probably be that it groups on each day/time so the summery would lose the ability to group by year.

Where as if we have a column with just the year, it allows the grouping of all items in that year:

Hope that makes sense

[Cadistra]

Ah yeah, I get it.  Less data to confuse the tool. 

Awesome, thank you so much again!