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Alteryx Documentation

Before we move on, we are going to do some housekeeping in our workflow. As you start to build bigger and more complex workflows then it becomes important to make sure your workflows are tidy and organised so that you and others can make changes to workflows without having to spend too long working out what each tool is connected to and why.

Alteryx Hide Annotations

As discussed previously and as you will have no doubt noticed, Alteryx by default adds annotations to tools whenever you drag them on to the canvas, displaying details about what function the tool is performing. This can be useful in some respects but often creates clutter in the workflow especially when there are a lot of tools performing multiple functions.

Step 1:

To hide, simply click on a bank part of the canvas to display the workflow configuration window. Under Canvas, select “Hide” from the dropdown menu next to Annotations and all the tool annotations will disappear.

Alteryx Annotations

Alteryx Tool Container

Alteryx also comes with ability to place groups of tools inside collapsible containers. This allows us to group several tools that we combine to perform a specific task and make them appear as one block that can be collapsed to save space and to easily make changes to certain actions performed in our workflows.

To add tools to a container, drag the Tool Container onto the canvas from the Documentation tab on the tool pallet and then the tools you would like to group into the container.

Alteryx Container Tool

Step 2:

Drag a Tool Container tool into the workflow and rename the caption "Orders".

Alteryx Add Containers

Step 3:

Select the six tools that we used to import and process the orders csv file, then drag into the tool container.

Alteryx Select Tools for Tool Container

Step 4:

Repeat the above steps for the products and promotions data sources.

Alteryx Tool Containers

The arrow in the top right hand corner of the container can be used to collapse or un-collapse a container as you see fit. This becomes particularly useful when we have large workflows with dozens of tools allowing us to shrink blocks of tools until we need to edit them, keeping our workflows manageable to work with.

Alteryx Collapse Container

Alteryx Comment Tool

Although Alteryx default annotations may make workflows difficult to read, we will often still want to add some sort of comment to parts of our workflows. In particular we may want to provide notes about what the workflow is doing or to detail the purpose of a particular part without the need to click in and look at the configurations. We can do this with the Comment tool which can be placed anywhere on the canvas.

Alteryx Comment Tool

Free text can be added to label a tool or make notes. You can also change the background colour, text colour and font of the comments as you see fit.

Alteryx Comment Config

Step 5:

Let’s add a label to each of our Input tools so we can easily see our data sources.

Alteryx Add Annotations

Tool Alignment

Finally, we have a trick for everyone who appreciates straight lines and angles. As you will have noticed, the flow of data within Alteryx worklows moves from left to right in lines but sometimes as we add tools we don’t get these exactly in line with each other.

Alteryx Tool Not Aligned

Luckily there is a quick shortcut that will bring everything back into harmony. Select all tools that you would like to align and press ctrl/shift/- to bring everything back in line.

Alteryx Tool Aligned
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