Joining of two survey data streams

[Maximilian93]

Hi all,

I’m new to Alteryx and have encountered a problem I’m struggling to solve. Using Alteryx, I am currently cleaning up survey data. I used Steve Wexler’s tremendously helpful post on “Getting Survey Data Just So Using Alteryx” as a basis for the attached flow.

As my survey program unfortunately only exports survey responses as text values, I have added a step to Steve’s flow to calculate the numerical responses. I then use these numerical values to make two calculations (I have highlighted these in red in the flow), creating a new column for each. As suggested by Steve’s post, I then transpose the numerical values and join them with the demographic/text values. While joining works perfectly fine for all original components of the survey, the results that I created as part of the two calculation steps highlighted in red are given as a right output. Do you know how I can get the joining to work properly so that the calculated values also correctly align with the text/demographic data? I tried to solve this using the Union tool using the “J” and “R” outputs from the Join element. While this combined the two outputs, it left the results of the two calculation steps bereft of any demographic data.

Any input on this would be highly appreciated - thanks a million!

[Qiu]

@Maximilian93 
Can you enlighten us more with some dummy input and desired output data?

[aluthra]

@Maximilian93 

I think the problem is "numerical values and join them with the demographic/text values" you can only join on the same datatype fields

[SeanAdams]

Hey @Maximilian93 

The most common reason for a join failing is that the data is not identical.   For example "CAT" will not join to "cat" or " cat ".    So what you can do to debug this is:

- Use a unique tool to look for distinct values from your survey data which are failing to join (on the L leg of your join)

- Then make sure that your lookup table uses these EXACT values for the lookup.

BTW - if you're doing a replacement like this - you can also use the Find/Replace tool instead of the Join tool - some people find this to be simpler and for quick replacements this operates faster.