Concatenate Unique

[smoskowitz]

Hello --

Many times, I want to summarize data by grouping it, but to really reduce the number of rows, some data needs to be concatenated.

The problem is that some data that is group is repeated and concatenating the data will double, triple, or give a large field of concatenated data.

As an example:

Name                                         State

A	New York
A	New York
A	New Jersey
B	Florida
B	Florida
B	Florida

The above, if we concatenate by State would look like:

A	New York, New York, New Jersey
B	Florida, Florida, Florida

What I propose is a new option called Concatenate Unique so I would get:

A	New York, New Jersey
B	Florida

This would prevent us from having to use a Regex formula to make the column unique.

Thanks,

Seth

[terry10]

This would be very useful!

[Ruud]

One tool would be nice, sure, but the example you're describing is solvable with two Summarize Tools. One has Group By on both dimensions, the other has a Group By and the Concat.

[haraldharders]

This idea was already posted previously (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Concatenate-Distinct-values-in-Summarize-too...). It would be beneficial to combine them.

@Ruud: If you want to do uniquely concatenate multiple columns at the same time, the current approach results in:

• Use two summarize tools for every column
• Use a row of Join tools to re-combine the output.

That is clumsy and adds unnecessary complexity to the workflow. And I presume it is much slower than an integrated solution could be.

[Ruud]

Not sure if it would be slower, probably. I took a look at your other post about this issue and while not ideal nor close to what this Idea is about, it could be solved a bit more elegant and PEBKAC-safe if you'd build a macro.

[prashant007]

Though this is a good idea but we should rather have a tool to just remove duplicates instead of adding unique to concatenate or any other tool.

If we can have unique values , we can perform other steps too with the unique values

[DavidP]

This idea would also be very handy in the CrossTab tool

[peterr_h]

This tool would be useful in Challenge #338 (Challenge #338: Let's Summarize! - Alteryx Community). I saw that the Solution contains multiple repeated Genres for each of the artists, due to concatenating genres from individual albums.

The way that I got around this was through a combination of Text-To-Columns, Transposing and Cross-Tabbing, however, I thought that a tool of this sort (or this functionality built into another tool as you've suggested) would be super useful!

[gautiergodard]

Great idea, and a scenario I come across quite frequently! Agree with @DavidP that this could be expanded nicely into the cross tab tool as well.

[smoskowitz]

Thank you all for your votes -- it seems to be picking up some steam. We all just want to keep making this tool easier to use then it already is.

Regards,

Seth