Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
On the heels of our wildly successful 40 tips in 40 minutes at Inspire APAC and Sydney, when @TuvyL asked @Joe_Lipski and me to reprise the session for AlterNext, we were:
There was one TINY caveat though. We would only have 30 minutes this time.
Still, being the two crazy ACEs from New York and London, we jumped right in.
53 tips and 10 chat questions answered in front of 372 enthusiastic participants.
With the new, shorter format, we decided to walk everyone through a simple data prep that you might encounter in Excel, to show off how much faster you can do it in Alteryx.
| Topic | Time | ACE |
| Intro + first half of workflow | 0:00 | Esther |
| second half of workflow | 12:30 | Joe |
| Excel comparison + Outro | 26:13 | Joe |
Enjoy our video below. Below the video, you'll find a list of tips we intended to cover. Yes, we planned for 40 even in the 30 minute timeframe. Hopefully we hit all of them, and we managed to sneak in a few more.
Tips + Tricks in 30 Minutes
- Drag and drop files
- Wildcard Input *
- Copy & Paste to Text Input from outside Alteryx
- Right click paste for exact paste location rather than ctrl + V
- Start input on line n
- Union only matching fields
- Rename connection string going into union
- Always show connection progress
- Right click and drag to zoom to certain part of workflow
- Double click scroll wheel to zoom to all tools & ctrl + 0 to zoom to full workflow
- Pin Preparation Category to tool palette favourites
- Autofield Tool
- Cache Workflow
- Select tool - remove/add prefix
- Highlight multiple to move in select tool
- Right click drag to move in select tool
- Forget missing fields in Select tool
- Use IIF instead of IF/THEN/ELSE
- Use "[" in formula tool to find fields
- Crl+scroll in formula tool to zoom in
- Name tools
- Ctrl+F to find tools (really useful in use with naming tools)
- Add a Browse tool (Ctrl+Shift+B)
- Remove Fields from browse for easier examination
- Search, Sort & Filter in Browse tool
- Add sort and filter from Browse tool to workflow
- Align tools - Ctrl+Shift+-
- Right click, distribute horizontally
- Use a Browse tool to save output
- Convert Browse tool to Output Data tool
- %Temp% Output Path
- No Output Path for relative
- Output to different sheets in excel
- Right click output link for directory
- Hover over tab to see workflow path
- * indicates whether a workflow has been saved
- Right click to duplicate workflow to debug/troubleshoot
- Mouse wheel to scroll through categories and tools
- Ctrl + tab to cycle through workflows
- Add Images in comments
- Getting Started Template
Cheers!
