I promise to resume my Spotfire expression series, but… This week, I will showcase 2 Alteryx tips and tricks I learned from coworkers last week. The first will be a salute and fond farewell to my teammate Alice Yu who is leaving the company. I am very sad to see Alice depart, as she is the light of our team and an all-around good and fun human. The second will be a warm welcome to Jack Stewart who is moving from our Geo team to the Analytics team. I can already tell that Jack approaches problems very differently from me, so I expect to learn a lot from him. So, with that said, here is what I learned from Alice….
Our analytics team works primarily in two-week sprints for a specific functional group. Last week, we were in Midland sprinting for the drilling team. Our sprints take place in a big conference room where IT sets up work stations for everyone at a table. It’s a very collaborative environment that I really like for short periods of time. There is a whole lot of, “Hey, do you know how to <insert problem> in <Spotfire, Alteryx, PowerBI>. Every time we sprint, I learn new things. Here’s how part of Wednesday afternoon went….
‘In’ Operator
Alice (yelling at me over the monitors): “Hey, does Alteryx let you write SQL in Formula or Filter tools? I want to write an “In” statement in a filter, like you can in SQL.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.”
Alice: “I’m gonna try anyway.”
Me: “You do that and let me know how it goes.”
Alice: “It actually worked.”
Me: “What? No it didn’t. Oh hey, look at that. Send me a screenshot.”
I had no idea you could use the In operator in Alteryx Filter tools. I definitely could have used this is previous projects. Without In, Alice would have had to write this.
[Department] = 'Exclude' or [Department] = 'Contractor/Consultant'or [Department] = 'COMPASS General' or [Department] = 'Facilities' or [Department] = 'Operations Exclude' or [Department] = 'EHS General' or [Department] = 'Not Classified' or [Department] = 'General'Clearly, using the In operator in Alteryx Filter tools is easier and faster. Thank you Alice for that little bit of learning. I’m not sure what other operators or bits of SQL you can use in the Alteryx tools, but if you know of any, please leave a comment.
With that, I wish Alice all the good fortune in her next role. Knock em’ dead lady!
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Alteryx 2014.4.8
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It’s nice that Alteryx can use IN, but gosh, why doesn’t it let us point the IN, to a table? Then we don’t have to construct a comma-delimited string which could become ridiculously long. it would look like this:
[Department] IN ‘Dept_Table_A’
And that table could have a thousand entries–a situation applicable to employee lists rather than depts, but you get the point. And don’t forget that the real point is to tell Alteryx as little as possible, because it should see the table and know that each row is an item to include. Now it’s 2022 and maybe Alteryx does this–but I can’t find it.
Amen!