Alteryx

Alteryx is data wrangling software commonly deployed with other applications like Spotfire and Tableau. This category will contain articles on Alteryx best practices, tips, tricks, and learnings. I am a new Alteryx user and will post as my skills develop.

How to Pull the Right Data from SharePoint Tools in Alteryx

Many of the automation solutions we build incorporate Alteryx with Power Automate and Power Automate desktop. In many cases, we read and write to and from SharePoint lists. However, as you might know, the ODATA query is pretty slow, and you can’t refine the query in Alteryx. This post explains how to attack these two problems to make sure you get the right data as quickly as possible. Read on to learn more about SharePoint tools in Alteryx.

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Automation with Excel, PowerBI, Power Automate & Alteryx! What Could Go Wrong?

One of our users was manually entering data into a spreadsheet every single day rain or shine, weekday or weekened, vacation or not. She needed an automation solution, and I built one for her. But, we ran into a small but time-consuming problem to solve. The automation added data to an Excel spreadsheet, but the updated data didn’t appear in PowerBI. Half the battle was figuring out whether Excel, PowerBI, Power Automate, or Alteryx was causing the problem. Wanna guess which one it was? Read on to find out.

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How to Include Line Breaks In An Alteryx Email

I love watching the Alteryx Designer discussion boards because I learn new things all the time. This week, a discussion popped up where a user asked how they could incorporate line breaks in an email body. I found a Knowledge Base article that seemed to have the answer, although I wasn’t able to dig into it right away. I posted the link. One of the other ACEs dug into it immediately and posted a solution that I later refined. This is why the Alteryx Community is so awesome. Read on to learn how to incorporate line breaks in an Alteryx email.

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Alteryx SharePoint List Input Tool Produces Nulls

Last week, I posted an article on how we are using Alteryx to Update SharePoint lists. While building out this solution, I ran into a problem where my SharePoint List input tool produced nulls. The SharePoint list was populated, but Alteryx was bringing in nulls. I wanted to elaborate on why this happens and how to fix it. Read on to learn more.

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Update SharePoint Drop Down Lists Using Alteryx Tools

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with our IT group to automate the new hire process (process by which IT sets up a new person with hardware and software). The old process kicked off with (GASP!) an Excel spreadsheet sent to hiring managers. As you might imagine, that Excel form and process was slow and fraught with error. So, it’s getting a makeover using SharePoint, Power Automate, and Alteryx. This post will explain how I update SharePoint drop down lists using Alteryx tools. Read on to learn more.

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Trigger Alteryx Workflows With Email

I bet that headline got your attention, and you’re probably saying, “That can’t be done.” Actually, it can….if you combine technologies. While I love being able to schedule workflows from the Alteryx gallery, there are many other mechanisms I would like to use to kick off Alteryx workflows, like receiving an email. Alteryx doesn’t allow this, but Microsoft Power Automate does. Combine that with the ability to call Alteryx from Power Automate Desktop and you have the ability to kick off workflows with email. Read on to learn more.

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Solve Query Timeout Issues in Alteryx

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on how to resolve query timeouts using batch macros. Shortly after publishing, Mark Frisch of CReW Macros reached out to me to say that my post wasn’t wrong (whew!), BUT there is another way to fix query timeouts without resorting to macros. It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I wanted to share his solution as well. Read on to learn another way to solve query timeout issues in Alteryx.

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Remove Leading Zeros in Alteryx

This week, I ran into a data engineering problem where I needed to extract a JV number from a string of numbers. The JV number can have 3,4, or 6 digits. For any number less than 6 digits, the system adds leading zeros. At first, I thought I needed to dig into some Regex, but there was a much simpler answer to remove leading zeros in Alteryx. Read on to add another tool to your Alteryx toolbox.

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