Alteryx essentials
Tools, joins, reshaping and workflow habits. 15 cards. Click a card to flip, or use the arrow keys and space bar.
What do the Join tool's three anchors give you?
L = left rows with no match, J = matched rows (inner join), R = right rows with no match.
How do you build a SQL LEFT JOIN in Alteryx?
Union the J and L outputs of the Join tool.
J has more rows than the left input. What happened?
Duplicate keys on the right caused a fan-out. Summarize the right input by the key first.
What happens to a field not listed in Summarize?
It is silently dropped. Group by it, or aggregate it with First.
Transpose versus Cross Tab?
Transpose unpivots wide to long. Cross Tab pivots long to wide and aggregates.
Why is Union "by position" risky?
Differently ordered columns are silently misaligned. Use by name.
What does Append Fields do?
Attaches every source row to every target row — a Cartesian product. Intended for one parameter row.
Which type should hold money?
Fixed Decimal. Double accumulates floating-point error.
What happens when you shorten a V_String field?
Longer values are truncated silently — check the warnings tab.
Which tool gives a running total?
Multi-Row Formula, referencing [Row-1:Field]. It needs a Sort before it.
Why inspect the Filter F output?
It shows what you excluded, which is how you catch over-filtering or a condition that never matches.
Your workflow duplicated its data on rerun. Cause?
The Output tool was set to Append to existing.
How do you skip a branch while testing?
Put it in a container and disable the container.
How do you write one file per region in one run?
Take File/Table Name From Field on the Output tool.
Why does a join match nothing on identical-looking values?
Trailing whitespace or case differences. Run Data Cleansing on the key first.