Alteryx Designer: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 4. Getting Data out of Alteryx Designer

Just as there are so many different formats that you can use to get data into Designer, there are also just as many formats and methods to get data out of Designer. You could output your data to simple sources, like a CSV file or an Excel file, but you can also output directly to databases, web sources, and major data visualization tools like PowerBI and Tableau. Most users output data either to files, like Excel and CSV, or to databases, like Microsoft SQL Server. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do both.

Like I’ve said in earlier chapters, Designer is extremely flexible and powerful, and can build well-designed reports and outputs in various formats that allow you to automate both reporting and analysis. This chapter will focus on the Output Data tool, but I will introduce many more tools for outputting data, which we will cover in detail in Chapters 9 and 10.

Files Versus Databases

Many of us in the analytics industry never took a formal class or received training on using databases. In fact, most of us probably received more training on using Excel for our projects than anything else. As we discuss outputting data, I want to use this opportunity to challenge you to consider if using databases might actually be better for you. There are two reasons I am posing this challenge.

First, Designer makes it so easy to interact with databases—both getting data in and getting data out. Second, there are so many features that databases ...