Engine Works

Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.

Alteryx Tools

I Am The Developer Toolset (And So Can You!)

Think the Developer toolset isn't for you? Think again. Start using these tools and change the way you are building workflows.

Apps and Macros

8 min to read

The Ultimate Alteryx Holiday gift of 2015: Read ALL Excel Ma...

"How do I read from multiple Excel workbooks/worksheets?" is a question we hear fairly regularly. Let's put together an Alteryx macro that will read any number of Excel worksheets...

Alteryx Tools

2 min to read

The Ultimate Alteryx Holiday gift of 2015: Read All Excel Wo...

"How do I read from multiple Excel workbooks/worksheets?" is a question we hear fairly regularly. Let's put together an Alteryx macro that will read any number of Excel worksheets...

Alteryx Designer

2 min to read

REST API In 5 Minutes-No Coding

Set your timer…

2 min to read

CEF, REST, and other acronyms

I had been with Alteryx for about two months when I started hearing people talk about CEF [Chromium Embedded Framework]. I did a little digging on my own, and true to its name, fou...

Developer

9 min to read

Web Scraping with Alteryx, Part 1

What if the data has yet to be fully collected, much less structured, and you need to get to it without driving yourself crazy? More often than not, this is the case when it comes...

Alteryx Designer

4 min to read

Coming in 7.0: XML Parsing

This blog post is referring to functionality that will be in our next major release. Beta users can preview this feature in the latest Beta release of Alteryx.

Apps and Macros

2 min to read

Grand Prix #3 - Genetic Algorithms in Alteryx

The 3rd problem of the Alteryx Grand Prix this year was to create an optimal set of sales territories for 5 existing sales offices. In order to judge the results, contestants were...

Apps and Macros

2 min to read

Algorithm Matters

We got an issue report on our internal support email about the non-overlapping drive time (DT) macro being slow. In this case it was running 29,000 5 minute DTs against a nationwid...

Developer

1 min to read

Setting Boolean Values

We had a bug reported in a beta release of 6.0 that a customer was having trouble disabling a Tool Container. Looking into it, I didn't see any issues, everything seemed to be work...

Developer

2 min to read

More VBS Scripting

I got a feature request asking for the ability to ask a question. In the end, the module in question sends an email. They want to prompt the user with

Common Use Case

2 min to read

Reading Multiple XLS Tables

There was a question on the Alteryx forums today about reading multiple XLS tables. This is the kind of thing that the DynamicInput tool is designed f

Developer

2 min to read

Regex Tokenize

Adam Riley talked about the Regex parse documentation seeming incorrect. His understanding of the Regex Tokenize is in fact correct, our help is clear

Developer

1 min to read

Generating Gaussian (Normal Distribution) Random Numbers

I got asked the question of how to generate random numbers with a normal distribution. A quick search online provides all kinds of formulas, it is a s

Developer

2 min to read

Alteryx API for .NET made easy

To start at the end, the source code associated with this article can be found at the end of this post. The projects are all built with VS 2005.I have

Developer

2 min to read

Simple Gravity Models

Before I get to today's post, I want to talk a little about Bill's recent post. Polar graphs are not for everyone, but what is really interesting abou

Alteryx Designer

3 min to read

Parsing Web Server Logs, Part 2 - Optimizing

Last time I wrote a module that could parse web server logs according to the W3C spec. Although it works well, server logs can get very big and there

Alteryx Designer

2 min to read

Geocoding IP Addresses

1st - a big thank you to Steve Pasetti of Accudata for bringing the MaxMind GeoLite City Database to my attention. He was asking me about how it might

Developer

4 min to read

Hexadecimal, if you please...

Recently, I had to fix a problem with the older Excel output from Composer. The initial problem was that a particular large file would only open in Ex

Developer

1 min to read

UTF16 not Unicode

I have been spending a lot of time lately working on Unicode issues. Mostly I have been making our older products like Allocate & Solocast fully work