October 2020

Spotfire Prompts to Install Over and Over

This week, I ran into an issue with a user whose Spotfire desktop application kept prompting him to install the latest version of Spotfire (to match the latest version installed on the server). He would click install, and the installation would run. The next time Spotfire opened, the process would repeat itself. Fixing this isn’t a simple reinstall, but it is a relatively easy fix. Read on to learn how to solve this problem.

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Data Limiting with Expression versus Show Hide

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on data limiting in Spotfire when column names change. I provided solutions using both data limiting with expression and the Show Hide Items function. I struggled to get working solutions in both because I expected them to work the same way, but they do not. Therefore, this week, I developed a comprehensive tutorial to show you what they can do and how they are different. Read on to learn more.

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Do You Even Cache, Bro?

I love the data caching feature in Alteryx. However, I learned this week I wasn’t using it as efficiently as possible. I showed my team members this discovery and none of them were aware of it. Are you missing it as well? Check out this post to learn more about caching data in Alteryx.

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Your Spreadsheet Format Sucks, Alteryx Will Fix It

Last week, I was working with one of our engineers to streamline an alarm reporting process. They receive spreadsheet CSVs of alarm data, and they have an Excel macro process to collate the data and pull out what they need. It’s not a great process, and it’s not sustainable, so we are using Alteryx to improve it. And, the CSVs come in a very unfortunate format. So, for this week’s post, I’m going to show you exactly how I took a wonky spreadsheet and turned it into something that BI applications can easily consume.

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