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Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Designer Desktop experts.

How To: Create a Text Input tool with Multi-Line Data

MikeA
Alteryx
Alteryx
Created

How To: Create a mutli-line Text Input tool

Here is a simple tip to create a Text Input tool with multi-line records as shown:

1.png

Prerequisites

  • Product - Alteryx Designer
    • Tested in 2019.1.4.57073, but the same process should work with older versions.

Procedure

  1. Create a new workflow in Designer.

  2. Drag a new Text Input tool onto the canvas.

  3. Enter or paste the text that will eventually exist as a single record into the cells of the Text Input tool:

    2.png

  4. Attach a Summarize tool directly downstream from the Text Input tool.

  5. In the Summarize tool, concatenate the column and change the Separator to , which means newline:


    3.png

  6. Run the workflow.

  7. View the Output anchor of the Summarize tool in the Results window pane.

  8. Right-click on the record and select Copy All Records with Headers:

    4.png

  9. Right-click on the canvas directly and paste.
  10. A new Text Input will appear with the multi-line record inside a single cell.

And that’s it! Why use this over the Summarize tool in your workflow? Well, you don’t really need to. This trick does helpfollow the best practice of reducing the number of tools in a workflow and improving performance (Summarize does a lot of work, even though performance gain here is minimal). It also looks cool to have a multi-line record inside a Text Input tool. 

Our use case involved creating static HTML pages and replacing certain values as needed. You probably won’t do this but it’s cool to know a new Text Input tool can be quickly created by pasting copied results directly on the canvas.