Text to Columns
Splits one field on a delimiter, either into new columns or into new rows.
Splitting to rows is the useful one people miss: a field holding widget, bolt, nut becomes three rows, which is exactly what you need before grouping or joining on individual values.
RegEx tool
Four modes:
| Method | Does |
|---|---|
| Match | Returns true/false — good with Filter |
| Parse | Splits into fields using capture groups |
| Replace | Substitutes matched text |
| Tokenize | Splits every match into rows or columns |
Parse mode with capture groups is the one worth learning — (\d{3})-(\d{4}) on a phone field gives you two clean columns.
RegEx is also the tool for stripping unwanted characters: replacing [^0-9] with nothing leaves only digits.
DateTime tool
Converts text to a real date and back. Alteryx dates are yyyy-MM-dd, and anything else is text as far as date arithmetic is concerned.
Specify the incoming format explicitly. 03/04/2024 is ambiguous, and guessing produces silently wrong dates rather than an error — the same trap as every other tool.
Once it is a real date, DateTimeDiff and DateTimeAdd in a Formula tool work as expected.
Which to reach for
- 1Simple delimiter — Text to Columns
- 2Fixed pattern with parts to extract — RegEx Parse
- 3Just removing characters — Data Cleansing, or RegEx Replace
- 4Text that should be a date — DateTime