Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
It it with great pleasure that I can announce the next release of the CReW macro pack.
It has been a long time coming I know, but I hope you enjoy the new content. I'm pleased to say this pack has three new contributors from the community, something which I hope we can continue with future releases.
Installation Instructions
- Download the zip file above
- Extract it to a location on your machine where you want to keep the macros. (Not in the Program Files/Alteryx folder or an existing Macros folder)
- Run Install.yxwz
Community Supported
If you find an issue let me know either in the comments below or drop me personally a note and I'll take a look, or if you can see how to fix it yourself then even better!
What's New?
New Macros
Description - "Reads in multiple sheets from multiple Excel files from a directory. Optionally can filter out sheets, can pull field names from a header row, can auto configure field types, can sample N random sheets, and if the headers do not match then raw data for the sheets that did not match will be in the 'N' output."
Description - "Have you created a sample set and wanted to know if there was a bias in the sample? Random doesn't always mean you get an even quantity of data across your variables. This test will check to see if the distribution of domain values (for a specific variable) are representative of the parent population.
Best to double check your samples before you run your tests!"
Moving Summarize - This is a macro I wrote almost a year ago now and featured on this blog here. But it really has been that long since the last macro pack release!
Description - "Calculate moving averages or any type of moving summarize"
Trim Mean - This macro was written by me and was inspired from the recent Alteryx roadshow in London, with a user requesting this functionality which is available in Excel.
Description - "Returns the mean of the interior of a data set. Trim Mean calculates the mean taken by excluding a percentage of data points from the top and bottom tails of a data set. You can use this macro when you wish to exclude outlying data from your analysis."
Bug Fixes
Missing Tool quick descriptions - A big thanks to David Zurbuchen (@zurbo) for both spotting these were missing, but better still taking the time and effort to fix them. A great example of how you can contribute to the macro pack with small but important fixes.
Runner Macro fixes - There were a number of issues with the runner macros in the first release of them. Many thanks to all of the people who both reported them and spent time with me helping to work out exactly what it was that caused them. There is one outstanding issue that I know of which involves uni-code characters in the module path.
Add Totals Macro - Now works when there are spaces in the field names.
Get Involved
I want to thank again the contributions from Joe, Mark and David. You guys have given me the motivation to get this going again.
And on that note I want to encourage anyone else who is interested in getting involved to get in touch either in the comments here or via email. I really want to make this a community effort and try and make the releases a bit more regular. There is plenty to do on the existing macros, samples, help files and I also want to try and make some more progress on my Test Suite macros.
Till next time.
