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Julie Sebby

Runtime Settings To Make Workflows Run Faster

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.

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Remove Columns with Zeros or Nulls from Alteryx Workflows

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.

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How to Reduce the Size of an Alteryx Data Set

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.

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Why Do Counts Aggregate Differently in Spotfire?

Last week, I wrote a post on using Axis Names on Cross Tables. My examples calculated the difference in Amounts between two scenarios on a cross table. I also needed to know the difference in well counts between scenarios, this time on a bar chart. But, when I changed the aggregation from a Sum to a CountDistinct, the calculations didn’t work anymore. That is because counts aggregate differently than the other aggregation methods. Read on if you want to get your counts right!

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Alteryx Hack For Ensuring Data Granularity

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!

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Spotfire Prompts to Install Over and Over

This week, I ran into an issue with a user whose Spotfire desktop application kept prompting him to install the latest version of Spotfire (to match the latest version installed on the server). He would click install, and the installation would run. The next time Spotfire opened, the process would repeat itself. Fixing this isn’t a simple reinstall, but it is a relatively easy fix. Read on to learn how to solve this problem.

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Data Limiting with Expression versus Show Hide

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on data limiting in Spotfire when column names change. I provided solutions using both data limiting with expression and the Show Hide Items function. I struggled to get working solutions in both because I expected them to work the same way, but they do not. Therefore, this week, I developed a comprehensive tutorial to show you what they can do and how they are different. Read on to learn more.

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Do You Even Cache, Bro?

I love the data caching feature in Alteryx. However, I learned this week I wasn’t using it as efficiently as possible. I showed my team members this discovery and none of them were aware of it. Are you missing it as well? Check out this post to learn more about caching data in Alteryx.

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