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

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.
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.
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

In this section: