Select Columns
Select Columns allows you to keep or drop selected columns from a table.
Last updated
Select Columns allows you to keep or drop selected columns from a table.
Last updated
Any table can be modified to only include the relevant or necessary columns using the Select Columns tool.
Selection
Description
Select Type
Choose between keep or drop options:
Keep Selected Columns
Drop Selected Columns
Columns to Keep/Drop (optional)
For KEEP, a complete list of columns from the input table will be selected automatically. Unselect columns to make sure only the ones you want to 'keep' are selected.
For DROP, no columns will be auto-selected. Select the columns from the list to 'drop' from the table.
The Select Columns tool makes it easy to transform tables to only include the data you really need in your workflow. The "Keep" or "Drop" select method options help users save time by selecting the more efficient option when deciding which columns they want in their table.
When a user first opens the Select Columns tool, the default selection will be to "Keep Selected Columns" and all of the table columns will automatically be selected. Simply click into the "Columns to Keep" box to adjust selections.
When changing the method selection to "Drop Selected Columns", the box label below will automatically change to "Columns to Drop" and any previous selections will be removed. Click into the box to view the list of columns and only select the columns you want to drop from your table.
In the example below, we are quickly dropping 5 columns from the end of the table that we don't need for our analysis moving forward.
The select columns tool can be extremely useful in many places in the workflow. For example:
At the beginning of a workflow, to limit the columns of a table to those necessary to the analysis
In the middle of a workflow, to keep only relevant columns as your workflow expands into various branches
