Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Summarize vs crosstab

KaiLarsen
9 - Comet

I'm trying to come up with good ways to describe summarize vs cross tab to people with no data analytic background. Any help to kick-start my creative process would be greatly appreciated. When can a task be done with either and when is one tool the only option?

 

2 REPLIES 2
SeanAdams
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

In my mind the difference is whether you're manipulating existing columns or creating new columns from row data.

 

Summarize is about taking the 10 columns you have and aggregating these in some way (either counting them, summarizing them etc).

 

Cross-tab is different - it creates new columns based on row-data.

AnimalWeight
Cat10
Dog20
Cat8

Cross-tab on that could be as below (where new columns are created from the rows)

 DogCat
AvgWeight209

 

Hope that helps @KaiLarsen

Sean

KaiLarsen
9 - Comet

Well put. It was what I had written, but more to the point, so should help me hone the point.

Labels