A big shout out to our Tip Meisters for providing useful and creative Alteryx tips & tricks. We shared them with our community at the 2017 Inspire session, their contributions were immortalized in the booklet as well.
And here we go again… If you have a tip and trick you would like us to share at our upcoming Inspire session, please post it here, there is no tip or trick too small or too obvious…
For your contribution, you will get our brand new 2018 tips and tricks community badge.
…we will give you full credit if included in the booklet…here is a sample from last year's booklet (thanks chris_love) :
… and our eternal gratitude :)
See you at Inspire !
Margarita, Jess and Henriette
Alteryx Tips & Tricks Club
You can select and deselct fields to view directly in a Browse tool without putting a Select before it. Simply click on the '# of # Fields' in the Results window.
1. If you are working with a lot of macros remember that you can save fields, your selections and recasting.
2.
3. If ever you are in search of a field throughout the workflow you can just do Ctrl+F and type the field name. It will give you a list of the tools containing that field.
Here's a crazy one for those reporting gurus!
When trying to refine your reports, you may be adjusting the padding to report items - especially in the overlay tool. I found that sometimes even moving snippets by the smallest allowable unit of measurement of 1/10th of an inch still didn't articulate the placement of a snippet well enough for me. How did I resolve? I set my default distance units in my user settings to 'kilometers' instead of 'miles'. Now my report placement can be articulated by smaller units of measurement - millimeters (~2.5mm : 1/10th of an inch).
Certainly helpful for the USA users!
Using the Interface Tools to create Parameters within the workflow. First, name the Interface tool under annotation/name. Then, you can call the value of that parameter within your workflow. For example, if I named my question "TipsTricks" I can use that value without any action tools by calling this function: %Question.TipsTricks%
This trick is handy for apps and macros; saves the need for action tools and can be used in Formulas, Filters, etc.
I'm always surprised at how many people build analytic apps but don't know about the Debug functionality available in the Interface designer which enables the user to test out the app and view where it is breaking if it fails...
@NicoleJohnson has already hit so many great points in the documentation realm of our Alteryx workflows...one tip I would add to that theme is to pick a color scheme for the containers in your workflows, and stick with it! Add the container-color legend right next to your logo/other flow specs for easy reference to your users. I have found it to be very beneficial when debugging or reviewing my workflows with other users/audit when everyone can quickly identify a few key elements of every workflow quickly.
For example...
It's a little thing that goes a long way when you're talking about Data Flow documentation in highly regulated environments :)
If you're developing complicated nesting macros (e.g. an outer macro containing an iterative macro that contains a batch macro) it can be difficult to figure out what went wrong when your final workflow doesn't produce the output you expect. If you add an extra Output interface to each of the macros and hook it up to a default text input, then you have a ready made debugging connection. Open the deepest nested macro, attach one of your other tools to the debugging output, then attach each debugging output all the way up until you get to your top level macro. When you run the workflow, you can see the data exactly as it passes through the tool three layers deep.
Internally, i've reserved the '#' hash character to signify debugging outputs on my macros during development. It's helped me figure out a couple of really confusing problems where my formulas didn't cause an error but broke on a couple of edge cases in our live data.
Annotating tool names and using the Find Tool option from the right click menu can really help when working with complex flows. E.g. "Union - outputs after batch" is easier to track down than "Union (36)".
The name is also another place that can be used to help document why/when I made the change etc for example "Unique - 2018-04-23 Added Theater" rather than "Unique (37)"
There is an option to Deselect Duplicate Fields in the Join tool. I learned this at last year's Inspire conference, probably the Tips and Tricks session. Prior to the conference, I was unchecking lots of individual checkboxes like a dummy.
Using a Sample tool is great for limiting the cycle time when adding in and testing a bunch of resource intensive processing downstream. But rather than removing only to add it back in for later development or bug fixing, just wrap it in a Detour and leave it in place.