Tips for cleaning and rearranging excel files in Alteryx

Question

Just wanted to ask, for those who are more experienced with alteryx, what advice/tips would you give to someone new to alteryx on cleaning files. What tools do you find most useful when you are extracting data in alteryx? And what type of data do you find most helpful?

Alteryx_AR · Answer

Hey @GustavoP1994

Nice question :)  . Well in Alteryx the Data Cleansing tool Data Cleansing Tool | Alteryx Help is absolutely amazing.  You can throw pretty much any ugly dataset at it, full of blank spaces and random punctuation, and it will immediately remove them for you and pop out a beautiful set of clean numbers. But, after using it I ran into a simple problem. Data Cleansing is a very heavy tool that demands quite a bit of processing power, making it quite slow. I found that even simple workflows working with small datasets were grinding to a halt. So a very simple tool Formula can be used for cleaning datasets.

An examples--You can use it to remove all the unnecessary punctuation but keep the punctuation you do need!  Many more amazing task this tool can do for you. Visit Formula Tool | Alteryx Help.

Hope this helps. Thanks :)

Luke_C · Answer

Hi @GustavoP1994

Have you checked out the 'Alteryx for Excel users' learnings?

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Interactive-Lessons/tkb-p/interactive-lessons/label-name/Excel%20Users