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. The Data Okay, the user in question receives 3 pieces of data that needed to be entered ..read more

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. Setup I created a SharePoint list like this. By default, SharePoint names the first column in the list Title. I left it as is and setup my Alteryx SharePoint List Input tool. After setting up the tool and running it, the data came back as expected. T ..read more

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. Setup & Configuration Okay, the first link in this chain is setup and configura ..read more

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. The Moving Parts I named a whole lot of applications in my intro ..read more

I’ve learned a whole lot with Alteryx over the last two years, but I haven’t done much with or from the Alteryx Gallery, until now. I didn’t even realize how much you could easily access from the File menu. And that is a travesty because it’s super easy to find and add new Alteryx tools, and there are a ton of great tools out there. That’s why this post is going to show you how to download tools and templates from the Alteryx Gallery via the File menu. Read on to learn more. Blog or Video? If you prefer watching to reading, you can find this same content on my YouTube channel. If you like the ..read more

Using a workflow output as an input in the same workflow can be tricky. How do you make sure the output is completely written before being used as an input? A few months ago, I showed how the CReW macro tool, Parallel Block Until Done, can be used to control the order of operations in a workflow so that the output is fully written before the input is used. The CReW macro creator, Mark Frisch, reached out to me recently to tell me that my solution wasn’t wrong, but that there was a simpler way to achieve the same task. He bestowed some sage Alteryx wisdom upon me, and now I want to share it wit ..read more

There have been several occasions when I have thought a particular topic wasn’t important enough to write about. But, some of my simplest posts have been the most popular. That’s the theme for this one. More specifically, I want to draw your attention to a few settings in the Runtime tab that might speed up your workflow or development cycle. Blog or Video? If you prefer watching to reading, you can find this same content on my YouTube channel. If you like the content, spread it around for the rest of the world to learn from. Please subscribe and share! Runtime Settings Users access the Work ..read more

Last week, I wrote a post showing how the Auto Field tool could be used to reduce the size of data sets. This week, I’m going to show how the same tool can be used to programmatically remove columns with zeros or nulls. This can also help reduce the size of your data sets and get rid of columns. Read on to learn how. Blog or Video? If you prefer watching to reading, you can find this same content on my YouTube channel. If you like the content, spread it around for the rest of the world to learn from. Please subscribe and share! My Use Case & Workflow When drilling and completing wells, w ..read more

I love that I can run huge amounts of data thru Alteryx. However, I also have to think about how much data I’m going to take from Alteryx and push to a BI application like Spotfire or PowerBI. As a general rule, less is more. Now, you may think you can’t do anything to reduce the size of your data set without cutting columns or rows, but that’s not true. Read on to learn two quick tricks to materially reduce the size of your data set. Blog or Video? If you prefer watching to reading, you can find this same content on my YouTube channel. If you like the content, spread it around for the rest of ..read more

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! If you prefer video to text, check out the s ..read more