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!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Add automatic width in Render tool

I have been going back and forth between output tool and render tool. The render tool works well when you want formatting. It's also great when you don't want an output created (when rec count=0) while output tool always generates a file regardless if there are records present or not. Output tool works well when you have a lot of fields but then you cannot easily control styling.

My issue is that I have a render tool connected to table tool. In the table tool everything looks neat; there's no wrapped text and no unnecessary white space (auto column width not necessary). However, with the render output, you don't know what to expect. Especially, when you have a lot of fields (30+) data gets truncated and column width is forcibly narrowed due to paper dimensions used in render tool. I skip letter and tabloid formats and now I have to mess with custom paper width (e.g.50) to get my reports looking right and when you have dynamic fields, this is not ideal. 

Would it be possible to make the paper size/width automatic in the render tool just like in the table and layout tool? Then this tool also doesn't negate what layout/table tools do so well.

 

 

7 Comments
FFFool
9 - Comet

Agreed X10!!

mocalvo
7 - Meteor

I am having the same issue and can't close out my project until I figure out a work around.

simon
11 - Bolide

I am staying away from render tool. It blows up your file size and color palette of formatting (cell fill) doesn't match excels native color pallet. 

Now i use excel template with named ranges and conditional rules to dynamically format. 

 

Simon

mocalvo
7 - Meteor

Thanks Simon...I'm going to give that a try.

ChrisRinehart
5 - Atom

for some server report tools I provide a PCXML render format for my downstream users as it provides flexibility of format generated at their discretion. Most of the time they want excel.

 

The Automatic Width Render would be perfect for PCXML format when extracting XLSX format via server. As the PCXML shows all fields not trimmed in the preview, but when exported to excel(and other formats) it unpredictably removes characters/trims to fit the format. In most cases the consumers of my data are not concerned with format size when using excel formats.

 

in the meantime I have eliminated use of PCXML unless I have a specific format size I'm managing.

 

AlteryxCommunityTeam
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Accepting Votes
 
Macey_Copsey
5 - Atom

This is very annoying to me as well.