Inserting Conditional Shapes/Icons in Cells Similar to Excel

[djodts]

Hello,

In Excel, I can use conditional formatting to insert icons/stoplights as shown in column E below based off of a condition driven by the data in cell F.  I am able to do this in a similar fashion in the table tool by making a rule to color cells however my result is more like column H.  Is there a way to be a little more sophisticated and add circles in a cell rather than coloring an entire cell?  Column E has a much better appearance in my opinion.  

Thanks!

[AbhilashR]

Hi I don't think Alteryx supports outputting custom shapes to excel.

If you prefer the appearance of shapes in column E, I would explore the option of outputting data from Alteryx into a specific column of an existing excel file (column F in this case). This way you retain your column E shape, which will be dependent on the value getting exported to column F.

[DavidP]

Did you know that in 2020.1, you can retain conditional formatting when overwriting cells in a sheet? So if you build the conditional formatting into your excel template, you can write data to it with the output data tool and your shapes should appear!

The other, much more complicated way, is to write an excel macro in your template file and run is as a vbs script from Alteryx after writing the data to the sheet with a Run Command tool or an after run event.

Both methods require you to write to an existing Excel file though. 

[djodts]

@DavidP @AbhilashR 

Thanks for the replies. and sorry for the delay.  For some reason, I no longer get emailed when someone replies.    I am actually wanting to display something in a cell within Alteryx and then print to PDF.  I am not looking to export anything to Excel.  Sorry, I must not have been clear in my question, but I was referencing Excel as that is how I currently have the report built and am looking to keep that functionality in Alteryx if possible.

Thanks

Doug

[jarrod · Accepted solution]

you should be able to utilize the image tool for this.

see my attached example.

basically, load a png, then tell it to rename the file (or replace file path) to grab the associated png. The logic then is built in the formula upstream with the file path being the output. 

[djodts]

@jarrod 

Thank you very much.  This is perfect.  I'll now just need to mess around with figuring out how to insert a 15px circle (that's the size I need to make it fit nicely into each row) without looking pixelated.

[cstafford]

where do you find the color values for your text input in the example. I need Green, Yellow and Red.

[JarrodT]

@cstafford the colors used in my example reference png files of the same name which are pulled in through the image tool dynamically. If you need any specific RGB values, google "rgb color picker". It should provide you with a nice color picker tool above the results.