Sams Alteryx Tips and Tricks ABOUT ME NAME

Sam’s Alteryx Tips and Tricks

ABOUT ME NAME: Sam Carey ABOUT ME: Maths graduate working for Hermes for the past 4 years CAREER: Senior BI Analyst ALTERYX JOURNEY: 2 Years 2

Best Practise Always remove any data not required straight away to maximise the performance of the report. Useful tools for this include: • select tool - remove any unwanted columns • Filter – remove any rows not required Remove browse tools before productionising a workflow. Document your workflow by adding comments to your Expressions and Tools with an Expression or Custom Filter box support block comments (/*Comment*/) and single line comments (//Comment). Use containers to group tools together and procedures together. This Keeps workflows organised, separates stages and allows you to turn off tools using the disable function of the container.

Containers 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. The Tool Container caption can be edited directly on the canvas by double-clicking on the caption and typing directly in the box. Need to disable a container? Click on the button at the top left of the container to disable in one click.

Connecting 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. 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.

Align Horizontally or Vertically Select or Highlight the tools to align, right-click on them, and select your favorite alignment, either Align Horizontally or Align Vertically. If you like shortcuts Align Horizontally: Ctrl + Shift + Align Vertically: Ctrl + Shift + + Distribute Tools Vertically and Horizontally Evenly space the tools in your canvas. Select or Highlight the tools to distribute, right-click on them and select the appropriate distribution, depending on the orientation of your tools. Distribute Horizontally or Distribute Vertically.

Auto Field After changing your data choose Options > Forget all Missing Fields to remove the missing fields from your Select tool. This will give you a cleaner look. Added bonus: This works for other tools that have Select functionality such as Summarize and Join. Metadata

We can now trigger workflows to run from within Alteryx. Triggering Workflows An Alteryx employee has created a bunch of macros that will trigger other workflows to run. As these are not official alteryx tools they need to be installed, I have saved the installation for these below (called Workflow Trigger Macro): The 4 triggers are: • Runner – Runs the selected workflow and outputs a log file. The log file will be outputted through the S (success) output if the selected workflow runs successful and outputted through the F (Fail) output if the selected workflow fails. • Conditional Runner – Same as above but will only run if a data input is received (this is great for getting workflows to run one after another and for them only to run if the previous workflow ran successfully. • List runner – Takes a list of workflows and runs them one after another. • Log Parser – Parses an Alteryx log into an Alteryx data table