Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Check out the Predictive District on the Gallery. There are great macros, apps, and sample workflows to demonstrate some nifty new tools.

How to call Windows User, Paths, or other Environment Variables in a Workflow.

Create a fiscal year calendar

Question Can an excel template be updated if the incoming information is not in a block form?  Say I want to fill in a form from an existing list into something like this template.       Answer This is a question we get from time to time. There are a few options on how to do this, the below provided by

how to add a product column to forecast for all the products at one time

Can I read in an Excel file located ina zipped archive file from Amazon S3?

How to Trim Numbers with a RegEx formula

How can I calculate the first and last day of the year of a date?

Here are some potential ways you can achieve this goal:

Duplicated macros can often occur when you import macros within workflows and when trying to install different versions of the same macro. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to clean up your tool palette:

Within an Alteryx workflow you may have instances where you have to hard code a value or only want to run workflows which have a certain field schema.   Both of these cases may cause errors in the workflow when the value or schema differ to that expected. Fortunately, there are two methods you can use to try and circumvent potential errors.    Option 1 - Conditional macros – CREW Macros Within the CREW macros pack there will be the conditional runner macro. This macro will allow you to set off another workflow if a workflow fails or succeeds. Therefore, if you are running a list of workflows from a Directory Tool and you want all the workflows to run even if a workflow fails, you can use the conditional runner to manage and continue the flow of workflows if one of them errors.   Option 2 - Expecting a set number of records or values?  You can use a combination of the Filter Tool and the Message Tool to look for patterns in the various records or files you are reading in. An example could be you are using a batch macro to read a list of files in. In each of these files you want to ensure a number of fields are included, so you transpose the data giving you a NAME & VALUE. Based on the NAME field you can use a Filter Tool and Count Records Tool to ensure you have the correct number of fields. In the false node you can have the records which didn't meet the expected value in the filter go into a Browse Tool or Output Data Tool so you can check out that file with more detail. Those records which did have the correct field headers you can crosstab the data back and continue that file through the process.    This is just a quick two ways you can look to avoid errors in a workflow, but I encourage those community members who can think of other alternatives and use cases please post below. this topic can be highly valuable for workflow conitnuity so learning more techniques can only help 🙂   Best,  Jordan Barker Solutions Consultant 

You have gone through the hard work of creating your macro and now want to make it easy to insert this into your workflow time and time again. You may have, up until this point, been right clicking on the Alteryx Canvas and going to Insert>>>Macro.    However, you can now create your own macro category by going to Options>>User Settings>>Edit User Settings     Within this splash screen you should now be able to see a macros tab:     At this point you can hit the '+' icon and you can give a name to your category and select the file folder where you save your macros in.    Then simply press Apply and OK and the new tool category will appear at the end of your tool palette.    Best, Jordan Barker Solutions Consultant

How to get email notifications when a workflow starts/ ends

Instructions for reading multiple CSV files at once!

It can be tricky to convert text to numbers, this article will detail out steps for when the ToNumber() function isn't ideal

Creative Concatenation

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 question is highly relevant when looking to circumvent Alteryx error's when you have hardcoded a certain workflow process to expect certain field names. So when you are trying to process multiple files with different field schema's you don't want Alteryx to stop processing all the files if one file fails. You ideally want Alteryx to skip the file and carry on!   Attached is a sample workflow that can help you answer the above question:   The Workflow   The workflow will start with a Directory tool browsing to the folder location that has all your input files  As this example uses xlsx files, we use a Formula tool to append the sheet name to the full path We then feed this data into a Batch Macro The Macro The batch macro allows us to process one file at a time but each file goes through the same process The input file within the macro is replaced by the incoming file path We then use a RecordID tool to allow us to keep the data integrity when we transform the data for the filtering process downstream In the Transpose tool, we use the RecordID tool as a key field to pivot on. We then transpose the rest of the data fields to create a NAME (This will have your field headers) and VALUE (This will have your data) fields. This part will be dynamic if new fields get added because we have the 'Dynamic or unknown fields' checked and they will fall within the NAME field which will reference in the filter tool Within the Filter tool, you can now add in the field variables you need for your workflow On the true side of the filter, you will now have the fields and values which met your criteria and on the False, you will have the fields which did not The ultimate goal though is to bring back the whole dataset if that file had fields which met your criteria To do this we use the Formula Tool to add in the file path of the file which we can use outside of the macro to bring together the whole dataset The final tool is the Crosstab Tool to orientate the data back into its original format using the RecordID Tool as the group by field.  Save the macro (File>>Save As) The Workflow Insert the macro into the workflow and connect to the Formula Tool. In the configuration of the macro choose 'Full path" from the dropdown. This will update the input tool and the Formula Tools The two outputs on the macro refer to the true and false side of the filter. You can now use a Join tool and connect the true and false to the left an right inputs of the Join Tool The field you will join on will be the full path and RecordID Now if the file met your condition in the filter it should have values on the left and right of the macro outputs. Therefore, in the 'J' node of the Join tool, you should see the data from your successful file In the 'R' you should see all the data from the files which did not meet your condition as they don't have anything to join to on the left 'true' side of the filter You can then paste your desired workflow to the 'J' output of the join tool and continue your data process This will now only allow files with the desired field headers to pass through and you have circumvented your workflow from breaking if the incorrect field schema from certain files is passed through.   S/O to Shaan Mistry who brainstormed this workflow with me. 

This article describes how to create an indexed map

Every so often we get questions about a .tde (Tableau Data Extract) file that is being output from Alteryx that has a file size of 30k when the original data is much larger. When the file is opened in Tableau this error sometimes comes up: An error occurred while communicating with data Source ‘yourfilename.tde’

How can I create a Cartesian join of my data?