There are a number of ways to customise Alteryx to make it easier for you to work with, a great post by Amanda highlights some of these, another great tip I picked up early on, but discovered not everyone was aware of, is the following tip for mapping in Alteryx.

In order to view points or polygons on a map in Alteryx, the use of a browse tool is necessary. When first using Alteryx, clicking on the browse tool will bring up the points or polygons themselves in the view, but without a base map layer. To get this, one must click in the drop down menu just above the map within the browse tool, and select a base layer to use. Clearly, doing this every time is pretty annoying so wouldn’t it be great to have a way where the base map layer always shows?

The good news is – there is a way! And it’s simple.

Follow these simple steps to always have the browse tool load a base map layer automatically.

1) From the menu bar – select Options > User Settings > Edit User Settings

2) Navigate to the Dataset Defaults tab, then select one of the map base layer options from the drop down menu next to Reference Base Map

That’s it! From now on your browse tools will automatically load with a base map layer when plotting points or polygons.

I hope this is useful! We’ve been using Alteryx for about 2 months now, and some of the other Data Schoolers were grateful for this tip, so I thought it’d make a great blog post for those who are still clicking away each time they plot points – often, the simple tips are the best! 😉