Alteryx Academy

Continuing with our Alteryx Designer Tips and Tricks Series, here are some ways to design and organize your workspace.   Make your Alteryx Canvas efficient by personalizing the orientation of your workflow, connection type, zoom levels, and container colors. The User Settings option allows you to set new defaults for all your workflows. It can be found in Options> User Settings> Edit User Settings > Canvas. These settings can also be configured for individual workflows, as described below.         Horizontal or Vertical Layout     Are you #TeamVertical or #TeamHorizontal? Try out both options by changing the layout for a single workflow. Click anywhere on your canvas, and in your Workflow Configuration window, under Canvas options, select your Layout Direction as horizontal or vertical.   Connection Types     Connectors in a bunch? Can’t find where your tools are leading you? With different connection types, you can make it easier for yourself and others to follow your workflow. You can change your curved connectors to perpendicular or straight lines, and you can even make your connections Wireless!   Canvas Colors     Alteryx allows you to personalize colors in the canvas. The Canvas and Containers backgrounds can be personalized, as well as annotation background, font, text color, and connection lines.   Undo Levels to Ctrl + Z     When building your workflow, have you ever wondered how many Control + Z‘s or Undo’s you can do? The default is 25 and it can be changed, just remember since each Undo utilizes memory, increasing the value may impact performance.   Insert Tool After     All Alteryx users have been there, the light bulb goes off: “This tool should be moved, but there are multiple connections.” No need to reconnect, Right-click on the tool then select 'Insert After' and select the tool to Insert. All the connections will go out of the inserted tool. Realized you need a tool in between? Add it quickly with swift clicks: Right-click on connection > Insert in Connection > Category > select tool to add.   Delete and Connect Around     When deleting a tool that is connected, Right-click on the tool and select Delete and Connect Around. This will not be enabled for tools that have multiple inputs and/or outputs.   Expression Text Size     Increase the font size within any expression box! Simply click in the expression editor you want to zoom in on, hold the Ctrl button then scroll up on your mouse. You can also make the text smaller by holding Ctrl and zooming out with your mouse.   Align and Distribute Tools     Got a workflow that’s trying to do its own thing? Get it into formation with these handy tips. Select or highlight the tools to align, right-click on them, and select your favorite alignment (vertical or horizontal). You can also evenly space the tools in your canvas by highlighting the tools to distribute, right-click on them and select the appropriate distribution.   Explorer Box     Create a new workflow using the Explorer Box to point to your help source. This is great for referencing Alteryx Help and API documentation, Regex cheat sheets, or any other documents you reference when building workflows.   Tool Container     Often, there are several tools on the canvas before you realize they would be better off organized in a container. Instead of dragging a Tool Container to the Canvas and manually moving each tool into it, select one or more tools on the canvas, right-click, and select Add To New Container. You can also quickly change the Tool Container caption  and disable a container with one click.   Disable Output Tools     The 'Disable All Tools that Write Output' setting on the runtime tab is great when debugging workflows as it allows you to check your processes without having to write outputs that can be time consuming or potentially harm downstream inputs.   Cache and Run Workflow     With the Cache and Run Workflow option, there's no need to run your entire workflow each time you add a new tool to see the results. This option runs the workflow and caches all data up to the selected tool and you can use multiple caches in a single workflow. The cache will clear itself if changes are made to the tool configuration or if cleared manually.     Videos produced by @mikecusic  and @MaddieJ . Special thanks to @MargaritaW , @JessicaS  & @HenrietteH for these original tips and tricks.     ... View more

Hi Maveryx,   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.    Welcome to Part 2 of our thrilling weekly challenge! Once again, a big thanks to Aki (@AkimasaKajitani)  for crafting this fantastic challenge!   Building upon the workflow you created in Part 1, your mission now is to elevate your outline of the icon into a fully-rendered Spatial Match tool icon and shine it over Alteryx headquarters in Irvine, California. Think Gotham City shining the bat-signal to Batman to come to their rescue—except today—the Spatial Match tool icon is the signal, and you are the heroes using Designer to build it!    In addition to using your previous solution from Challenge 403, a brand-new dataset is at your disposal, furnishing additional details about the objects, including their types and groups.   Here are a couple of hints to guide you through Part 2:   Use the Spatial Process tool to refine your basic shape. Use a Report Map tool to add the official tool color to your final image. The ideal green color uses the values R=51, G=153, B=51.   Best of luck and let your creativity flow! ... View more

Hi Community,   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here. This week’s challenge was submitted by Alteryx ACE and Grand Prix champion, Claire McCollough! Thank you, Claire (@clmc9601), for this exciting challenge submission!   Can you solve the mystery of the unjoined records? As part of a performance analysis, you have two datasets: one containing the Item Number and Item Cost, and another containing Item Number and Product Type. Your task is to get the Item Number, Item Cost, and Product Type all in the same table.   Although it looks like a simple Join tool would do the trick, for some reason, the rows do not join correctly. You need to determine the extra steps you need to take to make the join work.   Tips: Modifying the input YXDB files or retyping the data is NOT a valid answer. Your solution should use Alteryx Designer tools and work even if you have hundreds or thousands of items. All five records should join upon output. For the correct answer, none of the Item Numbers should contain leading or trailing spaces or invisible whitespace. If you get stuck, feel free to open the hints provided in the Start workflow. Source: You can visit https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html to identify the Unicode IDs for the invisible whitespace characters.   Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up: Changing Data Layouts Multi-Row Formula   Good luck!   Academy Team ... View more

Hello Community Members,   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.    This challenge was submitted by our valued Community contributor, Jifeng Qiu. @Qiu, we appreciate your continued creativity in submitting engaging challenges.   May the Force be with us once more!   You have access to a survey about Star Wars, with responses collected from fans before the release of the seventh episode in the franchise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.   Before diving into the challenge questions, you need to complete a few steps to clean and prepare the data for analysis.   HINT: For each task, you will be required to work on a unique question, outlined as follows: Which of the following Star Wars films have you seen? Please select all that apply. Please rank the Star Wars films in order of preference with 1 being your favorite film in the franchise and 6 being your least favorite film. Please state whether you view the following characters favorably, unfavorably, or are unfamiliar with him/her.   However, the data is not straightforward. Each question may have multiple answers, and the fields related to the same question follow a pattern: the question itself, followed by unnamed fields that appear immediately after.   Once the data is prepared, you are ready to complete the following tasks: Determine which Star Wars episode among the six films was the most viewed by survey respondents. Create a graph to evaluate the correlation between how often films were viewed (from Task 1) and the rankings provided by respondents. Identify the top two favorite characters (rated "Very Favorably") and the top two most disliked characters (rated "Very Unfavorably") based on unique respondents in the survey data.   Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up: Changing Data Layouts Summarizing Data   Happy solving!   Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/code/samaxtech/cleaning-analyzing-star-wars-survey-data/input   The Academy Team ... View more

Hello, Community!   A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.   This challenge was created by Desmond Turner. Thanks, @Desmond , for submitting your idea for this Weekly Challenge!   With the US football season now underway, it is the perfect time to dive into some football data. Over the years, the running back position in the National Football League (NFL) has seen a decline in value, driven by the league's shift towards a pass-heavy game. But does the data back this up? Use the provided dataset covering all plays from 2008 to 2019 to examine how the balance between running and passing has shifted over time.   Your challenge is to complete the following tasks: Calculate the total yards gained from run and pass plays each year. Determine the percentage of total yards gained attributed to running plays. Identify the top three teams that have leaned most heavily on the running game throughout this period.   Good luck, and happy football season!   Need a refresher? Review the following lessons in Academy to gear up. Introduction to Macros in Designer Types of Macros in Designer Macro Interface Elements Creating an Iterative Macro   Source: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/maxhorowitz/nflplaybyplay2009to2016?select=NFL+Play+by+Play+2009-2018+%28v5%29.csv   Alteryx Academy ... View more