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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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How to Debug Alteryx Apps

Last week, I built my first app. Then, I added on to that app. As I added on to it, the app became more complicated, and I started running into problems. I reached out to the Alteryx VSC for assistance. Part of our troubleshooting processes involved debugging, which is critical to producing successful apps. If you are ever going to build an app, you must know how to debug. Read on to find out how.

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How to Rename Tabs in Alteryx Apps

When I built my first app a few weeks ago, I created multiple tabs in the user interface. You would think that renaming the tabs would be easy. It wasn’t easy the first time I did it, and the Alteryx support person I worked with while building the app couldn’t remember how to do it. I found the answer in this Community post but still struggled to make it work because the post doesn’t precisely describe what to click on. So, I’ll fill in where this post left off and show you why it’s tricky! Read on to learn how to rename tabs in Alteryx apps.

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Create Alteryx Apps with Pre-Populated Drop-Downs

This week, I built my first app and will be publishing several posts on what I learned. This post will explain how to build Alteryx apps with pre-populated drop-downs. Future posts will explain how to debug apps, as well as open and close containers with radio buttons. Read on to learn how to set this up in your own workflows and apps.

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How to Improve Spotfire Load Times

Long load times are a problem all Spotfire users struggle with eventually. The first step to reducing load time involves understanding which tables are taking the longest to load. Spotfire provides this information in the Help menu, but it’s not in a form that is easy to work with. This week, I need to help one of our project teams optimize their Spotfire project, so I built an Excel template to parse this data. Now I know what to go after in order to improve Spotfire load times.

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