The Alteryx reporting tools (more info found here) are, as you might expect, used for making and rending reports from your workflow. For the advanced certification exam, five tools are listed by Alteryx as required knowledge for the exam.
Alteryx Reporting Tools-
Report Text
The report tool is used to create and stylise customized text and add it to a report. You want to use it for titles, annotations, or explanations within your report to help add context. The tool can be used without an input, including a panel to input your own text within the report tool:
For an input tool, the stylisation is copied across all records and allows the option to include the column value. To insert the column name, write the column name surrounded by square brackets (e.g. [Sales Profit]).
The extra ‘:A’ and ‘:0’ are just further options for configuring and formatting your column that I won’t go over here.
The report tool can also attach text to existing fields from a report tool. Finally, images, links special tags and background colours can all be included within the report tool. Here is an example of the types of things that can be done with the tool.
Table
Out of the five tools, the table would generally be where you start. The table tool allows you to turn input data into a specific row/s that is/are readable by the reporting tools. The table tool itself has a number of different configurations to modify aspects of your table. Some of these include grouping by fields to create tables based on a field value. You can change specific fields to have different alignments or widths for example, along with assigning which fields are included in the table. You can also add a bar graph based on a value into the table, along with formatting a row based on a specific rule (e.g. sales > $450). There are a few more things you can do with the table tool but they are a bit more situational or specific and would be best to try out yourself if possible. 
Layout
The layout tool is used to combine other reporting elements together in one report. An example of this may be a table underneath a report text tool for the stylised title of the graph. The tool is configured for layout orientation, width, and height, along with further customization of cells/borders/etc. Finally, the column order, and a similar per column configuration to the table tool is available.
This is also an example of a finished configuration using a table and text.
Render
The render tool generates the actual reports from the other report tools as inputs. The output is saved as either a temporary file within your temp directory or as a specific file that you chose on your computer. The other options allow for the customization of the report, such as size, orientation, and margins. Additionally, options are available to split the data values, and there are options to add a header and footer.
The email tool is fairly straight forward and would likely be the last tool you use from this list. It takes in data and allows you to send emails for each row of the data. The usual email info is able to be configured in Alteryx and optional attachments or email generated reports from the render tool. 
Conclusion
I hope this blog helped anyone who is trying to learn the Reporting Tools. If you would like to check out any of my other blogs feel free too check out my page. If you would like to check out my blog on the Alteryx Spacial Tools feel free to check out the page here.
