Make Columns Tool

This is a Laboratory tool and is not for production use. It may have documented known issues, may not be feature complete, and is subject to change.

The Make Columns tool takes rows of data and arranges them by wrapping records into multiple columns. The user can specify how many columns to create and whether they want records to layout horizontally or vertically.

This tool is useful for reporting or display purposes where you want to layout records to fit nicely within a table. Instead of showing a list of 50 records, you may want to wrap those records into a table of 5 columns and 10 rows, for example.

Configure the tool

1. Number of columns: Specify the number of columns to create. For each existing field, a new column will be created with an "Column_#" pre-pended to the column name.

If the input contains 2 fields and 2 columns are specified (with no group specification), 4 columns will come out of the tool.

If the input contains 2 fields and 2 columns are specified along with one group field, 3 columns will come out of the tool.

2. Choose to Arrange Horizontally or Vertically:

Arrange Horizontally: Records are ordered by their incoming position and cells will be populated left to right until the specified amount of columns runs out, then they will wrap to the next row and continue left to right.

Arrange Vertically: Records are ordered by their incoming position and cells will be populated top to bottom in rows and will wrap to the specified amount of columns.

If there is not an exact match of records, [Null] values fill out the set.

3. Grouping Fields (Optional): This setting is optional. When a group field is specified, records are sorted by the Group value and arranged according to their incoming record position across columns for the particular group.

Examples