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This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Select Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer:
The Select Tool within the Alteryx Designer is the equivalent of your High School Sweetheart. Always there when you needed them and helped you find out more about yourself. The Select Tool can do exactly this by showing you the data type and structure of your data, but it also gives you the flexibility to change aspects of your dataset.
***Workflow built in Alteryx Designer 10.6.
To learn more about data types, be sure to check out our Community Live Training video Understanding Data Types!
By now, you should have expert-level proficiency with the Select Tool! If you can think of a use case we left out, feel free to use the comments section below! Consider yourself a Tool Master already? Let us know at community@alteryx.com if you’d like your creative tool uses to be featured in the Tool Mastery Series.
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Great article! One of my personal favorite uses of the Select tool is to remove or add a prefix or suffix. An example of this is something I came across many times in my previous job:
I have two monthly sales files from different years. I want to compare the delta for each month between years. So, I joined the two files together by, in this case, the store numbers. Since the field names are the same for each year, the right joined field names all get "Right_" appended to them as a prefix. All I have to do is select those fields in a Select tool, go to Options > Remove Prefix, and make the appropriate choice of the prefix to remove. Then, while the fields are still selected, I will add a prefix, such as "LastYear_", and then I will select the fields from the left join, and add a prefix such as "CurrentYear_".