Engine Works

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

Apps and Macros

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

Box and Whisker Chart

The new Charting tool that will be in 6.0 contains a chart type called "Box and Whisker". For those of you who are not familiar with that type of chart, basically it is a statistic...

Apps and Macros

2 min to read

New in 6.0: Iterative Macros

Since 1.0, people have been requesting looping in Alteryx. We have added a lot of features over the years to give various types of loops. The GenerateRows & MultiRowFormula tools g...

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

Alteryx 2011 available now!

Today is a big day in the Alteryx world as we announce the official release of the long awaited Alteryx 6.0. It is always amazing to me what we manage to add to the program and how...

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...

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

New in 6.0: Connection Progress

The credit for asking for this feature goes to Adam Riley from the UK Alteryx Blog. This was a request from our Extend conference last March that he & I spent a good bit of time br...

Release | New Feature

3 min to read

New in 6.0: Document Constants

Document Constants are effectively global variables for a module. They serve a couple of purposes:

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

Removing Fields Dynamically

We got a question via the forums: Hi, I'm trying to output to Excel, but a number of fields in my data contain only Null values and I want to exclude these.

Apps and Macros

2 min to read

Dealing with Code Pages

Sometimes data comes in to Alteryx in an unexpected code page. One example recently is Tele Atlas started shipping their data in SHP files that are UTF-8 encoded.

Release | New Feature

49 sec to read

Unique way to highlight certain polygons in Alteryx maps

Note: Sorry about the technical difficulties with my earlier posting attempt.I was asked by a client to create a module to generate a map for each of their trade areas which are ma...

Events

6 min to read

Developer Summit: Developer Tools - The Basics

With Alteryx 5.0 and the new toolbox, there is a new tool folder called: Developer Tools. What is it and why is it called that?The 1st question that c

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

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

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

Thank You

Now that Alteryx 5.0 is finally out the door, my team and I finally have a chance to breath. Once again, the team did an amazing job. I believe that A

Common Use Case

2 min to read

Polar Graph Module

In mathematics, the polar coordinate system is a two-dimensional coordinate system in which each point on a plane is determined by a distance from a f

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

Alteryx 5.0 is on its way

It is official... Alteryx 5.0 was released on Friday November 20, 2009. It is on its way to our devoted users and loaded with new features and functionality.

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

NULLs in Formulas

It's been a long time since our last blog post. The core team is extremely busy working towards Alteryx 5.0. I hesitate to give an exact date, but we

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

New in 5.0: DynamicSelect - Database Statistics

We got the following customer request:We work with a ton of different input files in various formats, etc...and sometimes have poor documentation on w

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

New in 5.0: Financial Functions/Browse in Wizards

From several customer requests, we have add a new set of financial functions to the formula library. Mostly the functions are copies of what Excel has

Release | New Feature

42 sec to read

New in 5.0: Directory Tool

The Directory tool is very simple and small, but it can really come in handy - especially with the Batch Macros. All it does it read a list of files f

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

New in 5.0: Comparing Numbers

It seems like a very straight forward thing to do - comparing numbers. It ends up much more complicated than people think. The problem is that 2 numbe

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

New in 5.0: Module Dependencies

Have you ever gotten someone's module and had to change each and every input and output path because they were set to a different directory than you h

Alteryx Designer

6 min to read

Alteryx Best Practices

We members of the data team crunch a LOT of numbers! Sometimes, our modules run agonizingly slow, so we decided it was time to review our best practic

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

New in 5.0: Dynamic Rename Tool

With Alteryx 5.0, currently in beta, there is a new tool - Dynamic Rename. The tool will allow users to quickly rename fields through multiple methods

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

New in 5.0: Calgary Link Tables

The Calgary engine within Alteryx has allowed very fast queries, but it has had the limitation that it can only refer to a single data table. This can

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

Counting Records In a Stream

I have gotten the question of how to count records in a stream. The simplistic answer is to use a summarize tool. That works in most situations, but t

Release | New Feature

2 min to read

Why 64 bit?

Is it just another case of "ours goes up to 11"? Actually no - there are some very real reasons for 64 bit with Alteryx. It allows us to use more m

Release | New Feature

1 min to read

Maintenance Made Easy: Database Passwords

As sometimes happens I needed to change a database password. It's a pretty straight forward process: log into your database server, find the login, ch