Navigating Alteryx Designer
1. Navigating Alteryx Designer
Welcome to Alteryx Designer Desktop! It's time to tour the interface. Here, we can see the main view of Alteryx Designer, with the four main components used to build workflows. They are the Tool Palette, the Canvas, the Configuration Window, and the Results Window. The Tool Palette contains all the tools required to bring in, alter, and output data. The first two tabs have some preset favorites and recommended tools. All the tools are split into categories depending on their functions. Each category has its own color and tool shape - making it easy to determine the functions being performed in a workflow visually. If we click on the tool once, we can see an explanation of what it does. We can also right-click on a tool to access more options, like removing a tool from our favorites tab or even selecting help to get even more information about the tool. The canvas area is where we can use our tools to build a workflow to perform our data tasks. We can add tools here in several ways: drag the tool onto the canvas from the tool palette, right-click on the canvas and select the tool we wish to add, or search for a tool in the search bar and drag it onto the canvas. We can configure the tools using the configuration window to tailor a workflow to our needs. The configuration window will change depending on the tool selected on the canvas to give the relevant settings. If there are errors with the tool configuration, a red exclamation mark will appear. The error on our canvas is that no data is connected to start the workflow. It's time to bring in some data. There are different options available in In/Out. The Input Data tool is already on our canvas. It allows us to bring in data from many sources, like a file or database. For these videos, we will use data from the CIA from 2006 regarding facts about countries worldwide. First, select the Input Data tool. We can adjust the panels in the configuration window to ensure we see all the settings. The data is stored in a CSV file, so let’s click Set Up a Connection and navigate to the file we want to add. We now see various options for connecting a CSV file. The file format shows Comma Separated Values. The delimiter option has been set to a comma per our file type. This changes based on the delimiter used in the data being brought in. We can also update the settings to inform the tool if the first row in our data contains column headers and even which row to start the data import from. Below the settings is a preview window displaying the top 100 rows. To run the workflow, click on Run. A pop-up message will appear, confirming the run has finished. Click OK. In the results window, we can see the first megabyte of data from our source. We can see the number of records in our dataset in the Results window here. If not all records are displayed in the Results window, the “Records displayed” indicator will tell you how many are displayed and indicate that you are seeing partial results. Clicking on the Messages button on the left shows workflow process details and will show any errors or warnings. Clicking on the Output anchor icon will take us back to the tool's output. It’s your turn to bring in some data!2. Let's practice!
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