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Make Columns tool Make Columns Tool

Official Support for Make Columns Tool

As of the 2024.1 release, Alteryx officially supports the Make Columns tool. The tool is now accessible via the Transform tool category in Designer.

One Tool Example

Make Columns has a One Tool Example. Go to Sample Workflows to learn how to access this and many other examples directly in Alteryx Designer.

Use Make Columns to take rows of data and arrange them into multiple columns. You can specify how many columns to create and whether you want to arrange records horizontally or vertically.

This tool is useful for reporting or display purposes where you want to organize records to fit nicely within a table. For example, if you don't want to display a list of 50 records, you can use Make Columns to organize those records into a table of 5 columns and 10 rows.

Configure the Tool

  1. Number of Columns: Specify the number of columns to create. For each existing field, the tool creates a new column with "Column_#" pre-pended to the column name.

    • If the input contains 2 fields and you specify 2 columns (with no group specification), 4 columns come out of the tool.

    • If the input contains 2 fields and you specify 2 columns in addition to one group field, 3 columns come out of the tool.

  2. Choose to arrange records horizontally or vertically:

    • Arrange Horizontally: Designer orders records by their incoming position and populates cells from left to right until they fill your specified number of columns. After that, Designer wraps records to the next row and continues arranging them from left to right.

    • Arrange Vertically: Designer orders records by their incoming position and populates cells from top to bottom in rows. Designer wraps to the specified number of columns.

    If there isn't an exact match of records, [Null] values fill the set.

  3. Grouping Fields (Optional): When you specify a group field, Designer sorts the records by the Group value and arranges them according to their incoming record position across columns for the particular group. You can use the All and Clear buttons to select all fields or clear your selections.

Examples

Ungrouped

Table 3. Input Data Stream

Food

Apple

Banana

Cherry

Date

Asparagus

Broccoli

Carrot

Daikon



Table 4. Arrange Horizontally: The Number of Columns is set to 2.

Column_1_Food

Column_2_Food

Apple

Banana

Cherry

Date

Asparagus

Broccoli

Carrot

Daikon



Table 5. Arrange Vertically: The Number of Columns is set to 2.

Column_1_Food

Column_2_Food

Apple

Asparagus

Banana

Broccoli

Cherry

Carrot

Date

Daikon



Grouped

Table 6. Input Data Stream

Group

Food

Fruit

Apple

Fruit

Cherry

Fruit

Banana

Fruit

Date

Vegetable

Asparagus

Vegetable

Carrot

Vegetable

Broccoli

Vegetable

Daikon



Table 7. Arrange Horizontally: The Group column from the input data stream is the field selected via Grouping Fields in the tool configuration.

Group

Column_1_Food

Column_2_Food

Fruit

Apple

Banana

Fruit

Cherry

Date

Vegetable

Asparagus

Broccoli

Vegetable

Carrot

Daikon



Table 8. Arrange Vertically: The Group column from the input data stream is the field selected via Grouping Fields in the tool configuration.

Group

Column_1_Food

Column_2_Food

Fruit

Apple

Cherry

Fruit

Banana

Date

Vegetable

Asparagus

Carrot

Vegetable

Broccoli

Daikon