Using the Render tool to conditionally format your Excel files

No matter the number and variety of reporting tools that we may have at our disposal, we will likely have to deliver reports in Excel more often than we would like.

We know that we can easily generate Excel files with the Output Data tool, but these will not have any formatting unless you follow recipe #4 from Chapter 1. However, this method could be an additional demand on our development effort, especially when we have to use various conditional formats in our final report.

This is where this recipe will be extremely useful, allowing us to generate Excel files with conditional formats generated directly with Alteryx.

We are going to build an Excel worksheet, where we have the header we already built plus a table (similar to what we built), that incorporates some useful techniques to conditionally format its contents, as you can see in the following figure.

Figure 14.1: The Excel report...