Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
Welcome to the first episode of 5 Alteryx Tricks You Didn’t know, the series where I intend to level up your Alteryx game, as a follow-up from the amazing 30 tips in 30 minutes talk @mceleavey and I delivered at Alteryx Inspire 2025! Each edition will have 5 quick tips, all based around a specific theme.
This time: Workflow Navigation.
1. ✏️ Align and distribute for a cleaner canvas
The great part about Alteryx is that you can build workflows faster than you can think. The harsh truth of this is that often workflows in development can end up looking like a bowl of spaghetti 🍝.
Take, for instance, my really important workflow:
I don’t have time to tidy this up! I need to move on to the next workflow.
Let’s use some shortcuts to make this presentable. By simply selecting the tools I want to tidy (Ctrl+A for all tools), and then right-clicking one of the tools, I can hit ‘Align Horizontally’ to put all selected tools on the same horizontal line:
Much better! What about the distance between the tools, though? Alteryx has us covered again. Keep the tools selected, right-click, and hit ‘distribute horizontally’ to equalize the distance between each of the tools.
Beautiful, so in two small steps, we’ve taken spaghetti junction and turned it into something presentable. I get to keep my job for another day 😅
2. 🚦 Line Colors aren’t just pretty, they’re powerful
Did you know you can change the color of individual connections within Alteryx Designer?
This isn’t just a cosmetic feature – It’s an amazing documentation trick. Why not use color to visually highlight the flow of logic or indicate where to look for errors? As a simple application, I’m a big fan of using green for true, and red for false on my filter tools, but why not level this up to make your workflows as documented as possible? Simply click on one of your connections and apply a value to the Line Color option.
3. 🗺️ Workflow navigation panel
This is one of those ‘hidden in plain sight’ features. Did you know that if you select any tool in your workflow and go to the second tab within the configuration window, you will see a list of connected tools.
Why is this useful? Double click any of these options, and boom, you’re straight into the connecting tool.
This is especially handy in those massive workflows, or when you’re dealing with a workflow built by your past self who hadn’t learned about containers or comments yet.
4. ⌨️ Ctrl+Tab for changing workflows
Got 3,5, or 12 workflows open at once? Don’t waste your time clicking through tabs – press Ctrl + Tab to cycle through them fast!
It’s just like alt+tab, but for Alteryx, perfect for debugging or switching between a macro and the parent workflow.
While we’re here, a few bonus keyboard shortcuts:
Ctrl + F: Find tools in your workflow
Ctrl + R: Run the Workflow
Ctrl + N: Open a new Workflow
Ctrl + O: Open an Existing Workflow
5. 🔌 View Possible Connections to easily join pesky tools.
Have you ever been frustrated by trying to join up one of your tools to another, much further down the workflow?
Right-click any tool and select the option “View Possible Connections”. Alteryx will show you all possible output and input connections within the workflow. This is especially useful when you’re dropping new tools early in the workflow or trying to figure out where your join should go.
That’s it for this episode of 5 Alteryx Tricks You Didn’t Know! 5 very quick tricks that can massively improve your workflow efficiency.
Do you have a favorite navigation hack I didn’t mention? Drop it in the comments. Let me know if there’s a theme you’d love to see next (Macros? Debugging? How I got to be so pretty?)!
Check out episode two covering data preparation tricks here.
