Challenge #142: Life Certainties - Workflows, Death, and Taxes

[JoeM]

Last week's solution can be found here!

This week's challenge is around assigning the right income tax rate to each salary. Your goal is to count the number of people associated with each tax rate.

How many feel at tax time.

In our starting workflow, you'll find three datasets:
1) A grid of 100 employees from 26 companies. Before everyone gets worried, yes, I randomly generate this salary data and it is not representative of the population! Do note that each salary has a 'I' or 'J" representing whether this salary will be filed jointly or individually

2) A list of the company names
3) A tax table with the income rates. Notice that there is not a range in the tax table. You must infer the range based on when the next tax rate starts.

Easy Path:
1) Solve this problem as is.

Hard Path:
1) Do not use: Join, Crosstab, Transpose, Multi-field Formula, or Multi-Row Formula

[NicoleJohnson]

Why take the easy path when you can do it the hard way? Which, coincidentally, is generally how I approach my taxes.

My solution! Complete with super cute piggy bank macro icon! 

Spoiler

Chose to go the batch macro route since all of my favorite pivoting tools were on the do-not-use list... It actually ended up bring a fairly simple solution! Append + Filter achieved the "join" to the tax data, and some Dynamic Select trickery with the batch macro allowed me to calculate data for all company columns without an excessive number of formulas.


This little piggy paid his taxes... and cried wee wee wee all the way home.

Super fun challenge, @JoeM!! I really enjoyed this Monday morning brain teaser :)

Cheers!

NJ

[nikolaskardasis]

Hi all,

My (not at all efficient) solution but still within the rules!

Spoiler

[NickC]

Hello,

Why would you try and make it harder? Alteryx is all about making data challenges as simple as possible.  

The real reason I didn't do the hard way was its 5:30pm and I'm a hungry lad.

Solution attached.

[cgoodman3]

Two macro solution. It's fun trying to find a harder solution (which is actually better than what I was trying to do the easy way), to make you think outside the box every now and then.

Spoiler

[terry10]

I like regex!

Spoiler

[JoBen]

Cheers! I went with the hard path, and here is what I came up with...

Spoiler

I decided to use an iterative macro to stack the company columns and then I brought it all back into the workflow. My Iterative MacroMy Workflow

[WilliamR]

Using the second path and discovering a new tool.

[ggruccio]

Took the hard way!

[JoeM]

@WilliamR, I put all the restrictions to see if I could get people to discover a tool that would make their life easier. It was not Arrange that I was aiming to have people discover, but when I was thinking about disallowing it for the 'hard' way, I decided it was also a handy tool to have exposure to. I just didn't think anyone would do it (except for the one and only @Joe_Mako of course)!