“Life will keeping bringing you the same lesson over and over until you learn them “. While learning Alteryx, my biggest fear was to use “formulas”. Almost with every challenge, I knew what I need to do to get the result, but I don’t know how to write the formulas to get that result. I planned for weeks to find a time and practice most of the frequent formulas and their syntax. But did that day ever came? What I realized in The Data School is that the best way to learn anything is to practice it again and again. So, I decided that I will do many Alteryx challenges, to get comfortable with the formulas. I learned a lot from those challenges. After doing around 35 intermediate challenges, I was comfortable with formulas, and I loved the Multi Row Formula tool. This tool helped me to get a solution which was way easier and quicker than others.
So lets start with the tool, I will explain its uses in 2 stages.
Stage 1: Getting the 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5…. based on each category, i.e. giving rank/index record to each category. For this, we need to “group by” the field we want the rank/index for.
Stage 2: Updating the Nulls. If you update the nulls in same formula, its easy, but if you want to create a new field, you need to use the Tool twice. Always cross check -if you are updating the column, make sure you select the right column and right data type.
I hope this helps. The tool has other use case as well, please refer to One Example for this tool to see how it is used with Cross Tab tool. Thankyou.
