Alteryx Designer: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 7. Transforming Your Data

Transforming and aggregating (grouping or summarizing) your data is a critical part of building valuable workflows. Many times, a workflow’s entire purpose is to output the counts of something. The number of retailers, the count of employees, the spread of users—all of these are aggregations that give you insight into your focus area. The tools that I will cover in this chapter can take millions or billions of records of raw data and simplify them down to only a few key rows of insightful and understandable data points. We will go deep into the Summarize tool, which I consider to be one of the most valuable tools you have in Designer, period. We’ll also cover how to pivot your data to ensure that the data format and readability are what you need. Lastly, we’ll cover the rest of the tools in the Transform tool palette to ensure you become a pro at transforming your data.

The Transform tool palette (see Figure 7-1), like the Join tool palette, has a small number of tools in it compared to others we have discussed. However, I will argue that three of these tools are some of the most important tools you will use to build workflows: Summarize, Transpose, and Cross Tab. So, it’s important for you to master them. I’ll go into detail on why each tool is so important as we work through them in the chapter.

Figure 7-1. The Transform tool palette

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