Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

The Email tool is designed to send an email for each record that you input -- if you attach an Email tool directly to your output data stream, it will generate and send one email per record – e.g.: if you have one thousand records in a report you'd like to send, the Email tool will send one thousand emails.   The reason for this is that you may have a list of email addresses as recipients, or you might want to use a separate subject line for each department in your organization; that is what the input side is for – to allow you to dynamically populate fields such as the "To" and "From" fields, or even the body of the email itself.     If you're not populating your Email tool from your data stream, to keep the Email tool from sending a thousand emails, first separate a single record from your data stream, attach the email tool to that single record, and then hard code your configuration – including attachment -- into the Email tool. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this - a Sample tool, or a Select Records tool, or a Unique tool will all get the job done. The Email tool will execute at the end of the module, regardless of what is attached to it. Based on this, once you've written out your results using an Output tool, another option is to simply attach an Email tool to a Text Input anywhere in your workflow and hard code your configuration into the Email tool with the attachment specified – just don't put more than one record in your text input!    

Those of you who have used the Report Map tool to create thematic maps have likely been unimpressed with the way Alteryx outputs the thematic legend text. Alteryx added two little known/used tools: the Map Legend Splitter and Map Legend Builder. With a little finesse, you can get the legend to go from completely unformatted to fully customized.   Before After       Not only does this allow for an easier to read the legend, but it also can save valuable space on your map or document. The example above simply involves taking the default thematic output legend text and replacing it with user-defined text for those layers.   Here's How You Do It    The entire workflow is illustrated after all of the steps below. In the Report Map tool on the Legend tab, change Position to "Separate Field". This will output the map and legend as separate objects, allowing you to work with just the legend. Add two Select tools after the map. In the first Select tool, select only the legend. In the second, only the map (and BoundingRect, if needed). Add the Map Legend Splitter tool after the Select tool that selects the legend, and select "Legend". Add a Record ID tool which will be used later to re-sort the legend back to its original order. Add a Filter tool using the [ThemeName] field in order to extract just the records which make up the thematic part of the legend. For this example: [ThemeName] = “Block Groups”. Create a Lookup table containing the Record IDs and the new text for the legend rows that you want to replace. Join the lookup table to the legend stream using RecordID. Deselect the original “Text” field and rename the “NewText” field to “Text”. Deselect the second RecordID. Union the new modified legend rows back with the non-modified legend rows using “Auto Config by Name”. Sort the records back to their original position. Use the Map Legend Builder to rebuild the new legend. The default configuration is all that is necessary. From this point, you can choose to either overlay the legend on the map (using the Overlay tool), or join the legend back to the map (using “Join by Record Position” in the Join tool) and position the legend adjacent to the map as desired using the Layout tool.   Below is the entire workflow numbered by the steps above. Attached is a sample workflow created in 10.0.  

  We recently had a user that was looking to distinguish polygons between each other using dashed lines, a style not currently available in the Report Map Tool. But that’s alright, we can use the opportunity to showcase how you can be creative in Alteryx by using a few tools.       In cifically filter out the record IDs you want to change or use the Sample tool to pull random records, or 1 of every N Records. (FYI – if you use the record ID, you will want to remove that column after you have split the records, due to the record ID used later in the mapping process.)   Once you have selected the polygons you want to use, you will need to break those polygons into individual points using the Poly-Split tool. Here, choose Polygon field and Split to Points. Splitting the polygon into points will allow you to adjust the polygon by each point.   Then, you'll want to remove some of the points to create the “dotted line” effect by using the Sample tool. This tool's settings will want 1 of every N Record selected (you can change the N=3 to any number you like that will have the spacing effect you want).   Now that you have removed some points, you'll want to do a few things to give the points a grouping effect. In order to do this, add another Record ID tool, then filter the record ID by odd and even numbers. You can do this using the Filter tool and using the expression mod([Record ID],2)>0. Then add Record ID tools to the T and F anchors to complete the grouping effect when you add them both to a Union tool.   Grouping the points allows you to build your Polylines. After the Union tool, add a Poly-Build tool. The Build method will be Sequence Polyline using the SpatialObj and the RecordID, as the Source and Group fields, respectively.   Your final step is to add a Map tool and pull in the data from your Poly-Build tool, as well as the original centroid points of the polygons with which you created the split lines, and finally the remaining polygons you want to be represented as full lines around the radius. When configuring the Map tool, remember that the points coming from the Poly-Build are actually lines and not Polygons. Your layering will need to have Points, Lines, and Polygons to complete the map.

** Update ** With the release of 2019.3 the email tool now has the ability to accept email authentication which opens the doors for sending email through Gmail and other web-based email services. Check out this post on how to send email through Gmail using Alteryx.   There have been a couple instances lately where users have wanted to use the Email tool to send email notifications as part of their workflow but run into issues because their email service is web based like Gmail or Hotmail.   Unfortunately the current Alteryx Email tools don’t support email from an online provider.    However, there is still a way to send email from Alteryx with a web based email.  It’ll require the use of the Event tab or the Run Command tool and the installation of a third party tool.  In this example a tool called SendEmail is used (Alteryx does not recommend or endorse this tool, it happened to be free and worked).   From the Events tab or the Run Command tool enter in the command that executes the tool then in the arguments section add in the tags that are required for the particular email tool.   Events Tab:           Run Command tool:         There is another option in this post in the Ideas section by

Question Is the Alteryx Help available in languages other than English? Answer Yes! Currently the Alteryx Help file is translated in French, German, and Portuguese (Brazil). For the latest, click here:  http://help.alteryx.com/current/index.htm#HelpLanguages.htm   You will also find the Alteryx Server Quick Start Guide in the same languages.

A number of the Predictive tools have Interactive Visualizations.  A Predictive tool will have this capability if you see an output anchor with the letter ‘I’ (for "Interactive").\n  

How do we do this? Read on.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Multi-Line labels can be useful when you want to display multiple data points. Instead of using one long concatenated string, you can tell Alteryx to create a new line once it encounters a specific character specified by the user. To create a multi-line label simply follow these steps:

Have you had to create a report for a large dataset that, while having many rows, only has a few columns? If yes, then you are familiar with the following look:

A common use case related to mapping is creating a map of customers that are color-coded, for example, according to which sister store they purchased from or which branch they bank at. Typically, a thematic map is thought of as a map of polygons shaded by a range of values. But in this case, we are shading points according to unique values.

When creating reports, whether they contain maps, tables, charts, titles, etc., there will come a point when you will need to organize the layout of these objects. In Alteryx, the way to do this is somewhat similar to the old Slide or Tile puzzles. Remember this?

The difference between a heat map and a thematic map, explained.

How to get email notifications when a workflow starts/ ends

If I have a workflow that creates a set of data by region, how can I group the data by region and then send each region's data separately to each of the region's Vice President, all within one workflow?

This article describes how to create an indexed map

New line (\n) inserted in a concatenated field cant be read by the Email Tool causing body of the email to appear as a single paragraph

Now you can use the Email tool with G-Suite!

The Email Tool is a tremendously useful shortcut when it comes time to disseminate your analyses and other results straight from your workflow.

You know that a huge part of conveying information to your audience is your visual presentation. Here's a way to increase the amount of information that can be shared with just a glance: Segment the data in a chart with color.

Received the error "Error in PDF Rendering. Error Number: 4119: FILE OPEN ERROR" whenever using Table Tool or Render Tool.