Tool Mastery

For any macro or analytic app – one of the inevitable questions that you may encounter is “how do I configure this to do what I need?” For example, if you build a macro that checks if two fields are equal, but sometimes you want to ignore the case such that “A” equals “a,” and sometimes you want an exact match. This is where the Interface Tool Category comes to the rescue, with a super-tool called Check Box!

Have you ever wanted to restrict the fields that flow through your workflow based on their data type? What about only allowing fields that begin with the same word or are in a specific position? The Dynamic Select tool is just what you’re looking for!

The Field Summary Tool analyzes data and creates a summary report containing descriptive statistics of data in selected columns. It’s a great tool to use when you want to make sure your data is structured correctly before using any further analysis, most notably with the suite of models that can be generated with the Predictive Tools.

When using a macro placed in a workflow, the Macro Input Tool will be used to pass data from the workflow to the macro.  Becoming a master of the macro input will allow you the flexibility to map your fields, have optional inputs, and even optional fields.

Don’t know the area of your polygon? Need the length of your line? Do you want your spatial object’s X and Y coordinates? Don’t Panic! The Spatial Info tool can translate all that information and more!

The Date Filter tool is a very tailored version of the Filter tool with an enhanced GUI for date picking.

The Dynamic Replace Tool is an under-utilized tool in the Developer Toolset that is very powerful. It allows for dynamic formulas or conditions to be used in your workflow. It was first introduced in Alteryx 6.1. It’s one of the few tools that is currently multi-threaded which makes is fast.

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 Date Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer

Imagine this – you’re on vacation. You’re on a sandy beach where the sun has been relentless all day. It’s hot and you need something to cool you off. Ice cream would be perfect! The Find Nearest tool can help!

Trying to convert all of your old, mundane Excel workbooks into Alteryx workflows? The Running Total Tool could be the key to your success! You know, it’s that tool in the Transform category with the little running man picture on it.

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 Pearson Correlation 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 Boosted Model Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer

The RegEx tool is kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of parsing in Alteryx; there are a whole lot of ways you can use it to do things faster or more effectively, but even if you just use the blade it's still immensely useful. Sometimes that's all you need, but if you do take the time to figure out how to use a few other tools in that knife, you'll start to see that there isn't much you can't do with it.

The Join Multiple tool is a combination of the Join and Union tool. It is best used to consolidate a workflow into one tool when you would instead use Multiple Join then Union tools.

Sometimes you look at the steaming pile of data before you and wonder how you’ll ever get it in the form you need. Every option seems to require a great deal of manual labor, and as a lazy– er that is, as a data blending professional, that is simply something you will not abide.

For most tools that already have “dynamic” in the name, it would be redundant to call them one of the most dynamic tools in the Designer. That’s not the case for Dynamic Input. With basic configuration, the Dynamic Input Tool allows you to specify a template (this can be a file or database table) and input any number of tables that match that template format (shape/schema) by reading in a list of other sources or modifying SQL queries. This is especially useful for periodic data sets, but the use of the tool goes far beyond its basic configuration. To aid in your data blending, we’ve gone ahead and cataloged a handful of uses that make the Dynamic Input Tool so versatile:

Did you know the average football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes and only amounts to roughly 11 minutes of play? Now, I love trying to eat Doritos through my TV screen as much as the next guy, but for me the highlights are definitely a better watch. The Summarize Tool would probably agree - the most effective communication of your data is the most concise summary of it. Whether it’s concatenating strings for storage, merging reports to have better readability, getting your spatial objects to interact, or even calculating averages and other formulas on groupings of data, the Summarize Tool can reframe your data to be more informative. This article provides a few examples on how.

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 Output Data Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer

Inside the Laboratory tool set you'll find the Basic Data Profile Tool. This tool is similar to the Field Summary Tool in that it provides information about each field within your data such as length, type, source, shortest and longest values, and more. It differs from the Field Summary however when you get to the missing data details. The Field Summary tool gives you a single value for Percent Missing, but makes no distinction between whether that percentage is Null or Empty values. The Basic Data Profile tool gives you a count of records that have Null values, and a count of records that are blank. 

If you haven’t used the Run Command Tool just yet, that’s great. It means that whatever your analyses required, we had it covered with basic Designer functionality. But in spite of how great the Designer is, it just can’t do everything. There is a utility on your computer that can do just about anything, however, and it’s the command line. The Run Command Tool pairs the two into a dynamic tag-team duo that can wrestle all the computation you could need into one, integrated, Designer workflow:

The Generate Rows Tool, which is part of the Preparation tool category, creates new rows of data based on a user defined loop expression. It is especially useful when creating sequences of numbers or dates. \n  \n For example, let's say you have a dataset with products that aren't sold very often (not every month) but you would like to create records for every month and fill in quantity and amount as zero for reporting purposes. You can use the Generate Rows Tool to take the earliest month on the dataset, increment that by one month (generating a new row each time) until it has reached the latest month or the month you are in.