Last month, I finally watched the Super Mario Bros. movie and Jack Black’s song as Bowser was just so great that it inspired the title of this blog!
But… we’re not here to talk about Bowser or the movie. I’m actually here to talk about the Browse tool in Alteryx!
The Browse tool only has an input anchor (a leftside anchor) and connecting a Browse tool to another tool displays all data from the input. Without the Browse tool, the Results window only provides a partial view of the data, up to 1MB of data.
For this example, I dragged in an Input Data tool and set up a connection to a CSV file “Rat_Sightings.csv” which you can find here on NYC Open Data.
After hitting the run button or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + R (list of keyboard shortcuts here in my previous blog!), you can see that in the Result window, we can only see 1,910 of 219,035 rows! In the Configuration window on the left, we can see that Alteryx only provides a preview of the first 100 rows as well. It’s hard to tell what kind of data we’re dealing with.
Let’s attach a Browse tool now to this Input Data tool and take a look at the differences.
There are 3 ways to add a Browse tool to the workflow:
◆ Drag and drop a Browse tool onto the canvas and connect it to another tool
◆ Right-click on a tool that’s already on the canvas and select Add Browse After
◆ Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + B
- Note, however, it will add a Browse tool to every right-side anchor that the tool you’ve selected has
- For example, the JOIN tool:
After choosing your preferred method, connect the Browse tool to the Input Data tool:
We will also need to run the workflow again before we can see what comes through:
First, the Results Window now lets us know that there are 219,035 rows displayed and that is 41 MB of data. Notice that there is now a colored bar, the data quality bar, below the field (or column) names:
Most of them have a green bar going across while the one I’ve hovered over in this example has a bit of yellow. A complete green bar means that there are values all the way down and there are no NULLs while the yellow means that there are NULL values. Occasionally you will see red as well, labeled as “Not OK”, and the red means that the data may require some data cleaning, such as to remove white spaces, trailing spaces, etc.
If you click back on the right anchor of the Input Data tool, you will see that that colored bar does not go fully across because it’s only giving the status of the results it is showing:
Next, let’s take a look at the Configuration window:
The Configuration window now contains a Profile tab. The Profile tab provides a container for each column with the field name, data quality bar, list of unique values in the column, and the count of this value. The values are then also sorted in descending order, from the value with the highest count to the value with the lowest count. The top left corner also lets you know the data type for the column. For example, the ABC means that the Unique Key is a string:
When creating a workflow, I generally like to keep the Browse tool at the end of my workflow so that I can see if the changes I am making are producing the correct results. I also like to insert a Browse tool throughout the different parts of a large workflow so I can better understand the changes being made, especially if I am looking into someone else’s workflow. Hope this helps you better understand Alteryx and the Browse tool and with that, let’s analyze away!