Why Is The Dynamic Input Tool Needed?

Within organisations data is often collected and outputted into an excel sheet with tabs for each individual month. This produces an issue when inputting into Alteryx as you can only input one sheet at a time using the regular input tool. To input all of the sheets with the regular input tool, you must follow the schema shown in Figure 1. Each individual sheet is inputted and then collated using a union tool. This is time consuming and if the file is updated the file path has to be updated in each individual input and extra tools added to include new sheets. All of this takes ages. Below I’ll show you how to use a dynamic input tool to speed up this process.

Figure 1. Inputting Four Sheets of Data from the Same Excel File

Save Yourself A Headache- Use Dynamic Input

Figure 2 shows the set up of a dynamic input tool. Link a regular input tool to the dynamic input. Configure the regular input to read in the list of sheet names from the file you want to input, as seen below in option 3.

Figure 2. Obtaining the Sheet Names From A File

Within the dynamic input tool the file in question is selected, as shown in Figure 3. Be sure to tick the output file name full path to retain the name of the sheet. The sheet name should then be parsed out of the full file path. The workflow can then be run with the data beautifully unioned on top of each other.

Figure 3. The Configuration of the Dynamic Input Tool.

Dynamic Input is Far More….. Dynamic

If an extra sheet is added to the file the text file containing the file path in both the regular input and the dynamic input can be swiftly updated to input all of the sheets in the new file!