Here’s a great little trick I learned in the first week or two of learning Alteryx – two helpful keyboard shortcuts for aligning the tools in your workflow. It’s all too easy to make a really effective workflow that ends up looking a bit confusing if the way the tools are laid out is messy. Obviously clicking and dragging tools individually to clean up is not a great way to do things, but you can speed up the clean-up by using these two keyboard shortcuts.

All you need to do is click and drag to highlight the tools you want to align either horizontally or vertically (not both!). Then once higlighted, hit control, shift and minus (-) to align horizontally, or control, shift and plus (+) to align vertically. It’s super quick and can tidy up your workflow to help make things easier to understand.

Careful not to press both though as the tools will eventually align on top of each other! If this does happen to you just ctrl + z to revert the tools to their original positions.

What not to do: