Make Columns Tool

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

1. Number of columns: Specify the number of columns to create. For each existing field, a new column is created with a "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 it fills the user-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 fille the set.
3. Grouping Fields (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.

Ungrouped

Grouped