Tool Mastery

The Filter Tool, which is part of the Preparation tool category, separates your data into 2 output streams, True and False, based on a basic filter or custom expression.

In life, there are few things black and white. There are gray areas everywhere and the lines that separate can be a little fuzzy. The same holds true for data – especially when it’s human entered. That’s why we have the Fuzzy Match Tool – if your data isn’t clear as day, you can still get value out of your records by matching them to something a little more standardized.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. The Documentation Tool Category is underrated. Good comments and shareability are always a plus and to help spread the good word, we’re excited to unearth the last gem of the bunch - the Explorer Box Tool. How good could it really be? Well, if the Designer was the 1975 Notre Dame football team, the Explorer Box would be a shoo-in for Rudy. Be it web pages, files, or file explorer windows, the Explorer Box will let you embed and interact with all the above right in your workflows:

The Multi-Row Formula Tool functions much like the normal Formula Tool but adds the ability to reference multiple rows of data within one expression. Say, for example, someone was on the ground floor of a house and had a Formula Tool. They would only be able to talk to the people also on the ground floor. If they had a Multi-Row Formula Tool, though, they would also be able to talk to the people upstairs, in the attic, and in the basement as well.

The Multi-Field Formula Tool offers the same functionality as the Formula Tool, but offers the added benefit of applying a function across multiple fields of data all at once.  Gone are the  days of writing the same function for multiple fields.\n Say there are four fields with dollar signs ($) that need to be removed. It could be done with a Formula Tool and a function written for each field:

Now everyone loves to talk about their workflow masterpieces, however the notion of documenting them doesn't always hold the same appeal. The Comment Tool would be happy to help and can make documenting and structuring your workflow easy and straight forward.  Whether you want to include images, text descriptions or categorize parts of your workflow, the Comment Tool can act as a great refresher when revisiting workflows and make it far more intuitive for work colleagues to follow along. This article provides a few examples on how.

The Append Fields tool adds every row of the source input to every row of the target input as new columns. This is also known as a Cartesian or cross join!

Here we’ll delve into uses of the Download Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer.

Far more than just a window to your data, the Browse Tool has a catalog of features to best view, investigate, and copy/save data at any checkpoint you place it.  That introspection to your data anywhere in your blending gives valuable feedback that often speeds workflow development and makes it easier to learn tools by readily visualizing their transforms. Be equipped, and browse through the catalog of useful applications below!

Here we’ll delve into uses of the Text Input Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer:

This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Input Data Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer

This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Join Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer:

This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Union Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer

Unlike a snowflake, it is actually possible for duplicates exist when it comes to data. To distinguish whether or not a record in your data is unique or a duplicate we have an awesome tool called the Unique Tool that will actually turn your data into a unique snowflake.

Easily the most used tool in the parsing category, the Text To Columns Tool makes for an extremely quick dicing of delimited fields. To use it you only need to specify a delimited field, delimiter(s), whether you’re parsing to rows or columns (you’ll need to specify a number of columns to parse into with this selection) and you’re off.  Any way you slice it, this tool has you covered:

The Select Tool within the Alteryx Designer is the equivalent of your High School Sweetheart. Always there when you needed them and helped you find out more about yourself. The Select Tool can do exactly this by showing you the data type and structure of your data, but it also gives you the flexbility to change aspects of your dataset.

How to improve performance when reading from or writing to Snowflake.

Here at Alteryx we believe in working smart, not hard. Building out reports to highlight business-critical metrics is a pretty smart way to track goals. Customizing those reports to everyone in the department, then distributing them as attachments to individual emails? That sounds like a lot of hard work. Scheduling those reports from a refreshing data source each month so you don’t have to remake or rerun the reports yourself - that’s genius. Logging into your work computer to open up Alteryx, then having to check the scheduled results before having any peace of mind those reports were delivered without a hitch? Hard.

Data blending, transformation and cleansing..oh my! Whether you're looking to apply a mathematical formula to your numeric data, perform string operations on your text fields (like removing unwanted characters), or aggregate your spatial data (among many other things!), the Formula Tool is the place to start.  With the examples provided below, you should be on your way to harnessing the many functions of the Formula Tool:

OneDrive is a file hosting and synchronization service operated by Microsoft. You can connect to a OneDrive instance in Alteryx with the OneDrive Input tool and the OneDrive Output tool.

One of the most underrated tool groups, the Documentation Category is full of gems that can help you improve the aesthetic, organization, and shareability of your workflows. Chief among them is the Tool Container Tool – in addition to better aesthetic this tool has the ability to disable all the tools within it, lending itself to a handful of functional applications as well: