Inspire Tips & Tricks: Calling out our users to share their favorite Alteryx tips & tricks

[MargaritaW]

Dear users, thanks again to all of you who attended our 2016 Tips & Tricks sessions. Several of you shared your tips & tricks with me during the conference and I was able to present some of them during our T&T sessions and guess what? They were a HIT ! .... Thank you!

If you have a tip or trick you want to share with us, no tip or trick is too small or obvious, please share it with us by replying to this post. We will give you full credit if included on the Tips & Tricks booklet and inspire session. 

If you see a tip and trick you like, please star it. 

And as always, thank you for being the best users we could've possibly asked for.

Looking forward to seeing you at Inspire !!!

[Aguisande]

This post: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Faster-way-to-edit-existing-workflow/m-p/44331#M3022

Made me recall a very useful trick: "How to limit the rows for all input tools"

Workflow properties -> Runtime -> Record Limit to All Inputs

[jarrod]

Spatial Match Config - connect datastream that has larger polygons to the Target input and pull in the Universe from a yxdb using the "Use Records from File or Database" option within the tool (do not connect to "U" node) - makes use of the spatial index within the yxdb file.

Use Find and Replace instead of Join tool since it doesn't sort

If you are appending fields using the Join tool, rename fields with a prefix (or suffix) before joining to another data set that contains the same field names. Then you union all 3 outputs to complete a full outer join without any issues with misaligned fields.

If you ever find yourself copy/pasting, look to make a batch macro or utilize the Transpose/crosstab tools. A lot of times, you can accomplish the same results by grouping/batching the records. 

[tom_montpool]

I find that I re-use workflows on a regular basis -- files that come in quarterly, semi-annually, annually -- but how many times are the input files "exactly" the same as the previous time...(that was rhetorical, because it almost never happens!)

There are two options in Workflow Properties -> Runtime -> that are great for this

1) Disable all Browse Tools

2) Disable all Tools that Write Output

Here's what I do:

Build a workflow with a bunch of Browses to be sure I get what I want

(hint -- use Record Limit like @Aguisande posted in this conversation)

Disable all Browse Tools to speed up the final run

Come back {n time} later

Enable all Browse Tools and Disable all Tools that Write Output

Point to the new input file and run the module (all the Browses populate, no outputs are generated!)

If it all looks good, Disable Browses and Enable Outputs

[TaraM]

These never get old. The Information lab published a top 5 Alteryx Shortcuts blog post which has some useful ones.

[Hollingsworth]

This one crashed a production ETL job last night so I thought I'd share this while it was fresh.

Tip: When you have a stable workflow that you want to use in a production environment, put a Select tool somewhere before the output/s and uncheck the row labeled *Unknown at the bottom of the list of fields. That way if your input data changes, then the workflow won't be able to add any new fields that your destination file or database is not expecting.

Edit: After consideration, I think that it would be more robust to put the select tool directly after the Input tool rather than before the Output tool.

[clsmerker16235]

Data Densification, only where you need it:

Create one field concatenating every relevant level of detail within your dataset.  Use the summarize tool to group this field.  Then, use the generate rows tool to densify the data based a min and max date within the entire dataset(or static dates).

[JohnJPS]

One recent solution that has stuck with me as kind of cool to have done without using a macro: joining a transpose to itself in order to convert a hierarchy into a list of parent/child pairs. This is described here, as a response to a community question; and can also be easily reversed as described in the follow-up Q&A:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/transforming-a-hierarchy-in-to-a-flat-fil...

Since hierarchies and parent/child pairs are pretty common structures, this simple, fast conversion pattern might be a useful tip.

[SeanAdams]

My favourite is that you can do bulk updates to an existing workflow if you open it up in a text editor (like notepad ++).

Example being - you have a set of processes which pull data together and manipulate in several different steps, and all of these tables are being moved to a different server / different schema.   doing this the hard way would be trial and error - but if you open up the Alteryx file in a text editor, find/replace, then in 3 mins you're back in business.

this has saved me hours!

[SeanAdams]

Oh - and the other is that you can use Summarize to create character-delimited fields.   Use the Text-to-columns to disassemble the string; use summarise with a concatenate to put it back together again.

Final one is that Union is not just for lists or tables.   Union is used for spatial data and for reports too - in fact, without Union, you'd be pretty stuck trying to get anything done with the reporting tools.

[Rohit_Bajaj]

One of the shortcuts we were using was for creating additional rows ( Name value pairs) all containing null values(to meet some architecture constraint). This was to be done along with the fields which actually contained data. In essense data was being fetched from source, getting transposed to rows before being populated into target.

The shortcut was - to add a formula (reuse existing one) before transpose.
Open the workflow in xml, append the needed information for particular formula tool ( search by tool id) i.e. fields with null values and string data type. Save the file and reopen as Alteryx code.

These fields in proper format could be generated very easily in excel using basic formulas and overall the trick came very handy to add large number of fields as compared to configuring from front end.

Thanks,
Rohit Bajaj