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Alteryx Hack For Ensuring Data Granularity

In our last sprint, the AAET team worked up a series of Alteryx workflows for our annual planning process that combines forecast and actual data. It’s a massive data set that pulls from a new forecasting database, so we are beginners with this data. One of my coworkers, Jack Stewart, showed me an Alteryx hack he uses with Cross Tab tools to ensure the granularity of the data is what he thinks it is. As I took over his workflows, this hack saved me multiple times when I didn’t realize records had been duplicated. Read on to learn a new Alteryx trick!

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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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Troubleshooting Custom Expressions in Spotfire

Working with custom expressions in Spotfire can be tricky. You try different combinations of syntax and just get errors. Sometimes the error message is helpful, but often it is just jibberish. How do you know exactly what’s getting passed thru the expression? There is a way to find out. Check out this short post for a solid pro-tip on troubleshooting custom expressions in Spotfire.

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Limiting Data When Columns Change

This week I worked with one of our engineers on a Spotfire project where he needed to filter out nulls and zeros from his visualizations. This should be easy, but users set the y-axis columns using a property control. Basic data limiting by expression was impossible because the columns kept changing. Limiting data when columns change is challenging but not impossible. There are two ways to do it. Read on to learn more.

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Calculate the Last Value on a Visualization

Spotfire’s label functionality leaves a lot to be desired. You can turn on all labels, which will probably clutter the chart since you can’t move labels on most charts. Or, you can mark data points to see select labels. None of this is helpful if you want specific labels on an exported report, which is where I found myself last week. To get around Spotfire limitations and still fulfill my customer requirements, I opted to add a text area with a calculated value above my visualization. This allowed me to calculate the last value from a visualization without dealing with labels. My calculation was cumulative, so I expected that if I used the same calculation, the end result would be the last value on my visualization. It was not. Even TIBCO support was stumped as to why this didn’t work. Read on to learn a little bit more about calculated values and the Spotfire expression language.

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