Top 5 Alteryx Shortcuts

The other day I was lucky enough to watch my colleague Phil Lowe give a great online training session on data prep in Alteryx. In the session Phil also showed off some pretty neat tricks and shortcuts for Alteryx. Here are my top 5:

Often we will work with messy data. The data cleansing tool is fairly new to our Alteryx tool set. It allows us to fix common problems in our data all in one tool. You can select multiple fields to cleanse all in one go and perform common cleanups: replacing nulls with blanks or zeros; removing unwanted characters like whitespaces or punctuation; and modify the capitalisation of string fields.

In this workflow the data cleansing tool is helping me to remove punctuation (commas ',') from my product field.

Definitely one to add to your Alteryx arsenal.

The auto field tool is a really handy way of optimising your data's performance. It will optimise the field type and length. In this example I'll place a select tool before and after the auto field tool so we can see what it's doing.

Before auto field:

After auto field:

We can see the auto field tool has optimised our string fields be finding the maximum number of characters and reducing our field size and changing the field type where appropriate.

We can then save this configuration and load it in to a select tool elsewhere in the workflow.

In the configuration of the last select tool choose to export the configuration:

Then in any other select tool you can load in the saved configuration:

I never knew this and it is so useful! There are times when you have a completed workflow that goes to various outputs (files, databases etc). However you might want to make small adjustments and test the workflow again before you write out to these outputs. I was always removing the connections to the outputs (which caused errors I had to ignore) and then re-connect the outputs back in to the workflow when ready to write out. But no more!

Click anywhere on the canvas (background of the workflow) and go to the Runtime tab in the workflow configuration. There is a checkbox to disable all output tools.

This is going to be a massive time saver!

If you're a bit OCD about perfectly aligned tools and connections in your workflow then you are going to love these shortcuts!

Use  ctrl+shift+- or + to align vertical or horizontal.

If you're like me you constantly want to see how each tool has affected your data. We can view the data anytime we like in Alteryx using a browse tool. You'll probably end up with a few of these on your workflow as you build. To add them quickly you can select the tool to add the browse to and use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+B. From a browse tool you can also use the save button to export the data out of Alteryx too.

From version 10.5 we can now use the 'browse anywhere' feature. After running your workflow you can now select any tool and at the bottom of the canvas (unless you've moved it) you'll see the results of the data after that tool. So useful!

What are your favourite Alteryx shortcuts?