Engine Works

TheOC · ‎07-30-2025

Welcome back to 5 Alteryx Tricks You Didn’t Know, the series where I intend to level up your Alteryx game. Each edition will have 5 quick tips, all based around a specific theme (and if you missed the last edition, you can read it here).

This time: Workflow Configuration.

1. ⚙️ Leverage Runtime Settings to maximize your Alteryx.

Before you run your workflow, let’s just have a quick look at some of the options we have under the hood. In your Workflow’s configuration window, hit the ‘runtime’ tab to see the following powerful settings:

Each and every one of these settings is worth knowing, and I’d encourage you to have a play with these. The two I’d personally say are most useful are:

🛑 Cancel Running Workflow on Error:

This setting will immediately stop a workflow if an error occurs, saving time and resources, which is really useful when developing. This is also useful longer term with intermittent issues (network/firewall issues between a live database connection, for instance).

⌚ Enable Performance Profiling:

Ever wondered which tools are slowing down your Alteryx workflow? Turn on this option and run your workflow again to get detailed run-time statistics per tool, including time taken to run, and % of the total runtime. This is amazing for optimizing your workflows.

2. 💾 Workflow Templates = Save Time and Tidy Your Workflow from the very start

Are all your workflows tidy, documented, and easy to read? Nah, me neither.

With Workflow Templates, though, we both have no excuse – Alteryx allows us to start completely new workflows, macros, and apps with a set template. Why this is so amazing is that we can integrate branding, development standards, and comments from the very start:

This is perfect for maintaining team standards, personal conventions, or just hitting the ground running when you want to build quickly. Templates can be saved and accessed from the File Menu inside Alteryx:

And if you’re interested in starting with the Bulien template, I’ve attached that to this blog!

Source: GIPHY

3. ♻️ Workflow constants: Write once, use everywhere.

I’m a big fan of the mantra: “If you’re going to do something twice, do it once dynamically” and workflow constants are a perfect example of this. These are reusable values that you can set once and reference across multiple tools.

Take, for example, the following:

I have an interest rate ‘1.2’, and a value that is multiplied by it. This works fine, but what if that interest rate is due to change often, and is used across multiple points in the workflow – filters, formulas, multi-rows… pain.

I also want Steve from finance to be able to use this workflow, but he’s not the best at Alteryx. Poor Steve.

Let’s make it as simple as possible for Steve – One place to adjust the value that changes across the whole workflow. In the Workflow Tab, I can create a new constant:

‘Interest Rate’ – which can now be referenced In my formulas:

Now all Steve has to do is change the one value within the constants to change this value anywhere it is referenced within the workflow. Thanks Steve.

4. 📝 Rename your tools for easy searching

You may have noticed that Alteryx is nice enough to automatically name any tool you put on the canvas, e.g ‘Filter (3)’:

But did you know you can actually rename the tools within their configuration?

Now, when I run the same workflow:

This makes it very easy to diagnose errors, check values, or even search for specific tools with ctrl+F.

5. 📩 Workflow Events – Find out as soon as something goes wrong

I find it hard not to keep my eye on any workflow I run, even if they have millions of rows to process and takes time. I’ve found I can alleviate this bottleneck through Workflow Events. These can be used for many things, but my favorite is easily sending me an email if a particular workflow fails. These can be found within the Workflow Configuration:

Now we’re not just building workflows – we’re building production-ready processes with resilience. Especially useful for those scheduled, high-importance workflows. The coolest part? These emails can be configured to send you the log and reason the workflow failed, making it incredibly easy to navigate issues with your workflows.

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.

Got a favorite configuration hack I didn’t mention? Drop it in the comments! And check out Episode 4!