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The Text block for a composed report. It is the equivalent of the matching Alteryx Reporting / Portfolio Composer tool and runs in the workflow engine (reportlab / matplotlib); the renderer is an approximation of the Alteryx output.

  • Source Table — the data feeding this report piece.
  • Output Table — the table the rendered snippet is written to.
  • Report order — the order of this piece within a composed report.
  • Text content — the text to render.

Text content can name a column in square brackets, and the value is printed in its place — [Year] Results prints 2026 Results. A converted Alteryx Report Text carries whatever field references its text already had, including the formatted form Alteryx writes as [Year:A].

One piece of text is composed for the whole source table, so a column you name must hold the same value on every row it reads. Summarize the column upstream if it holds more than one — a text block cannot print several values at once.

[CurrentYear] prints the year the report is rendered, and needs no column.

A few rules keep ordinary prose safe to write:

  • A name that matches a column is always replaced.
  • A name that matches no column stops the step and says so, but only where it could not be anything but a reference — a format written tight against the colon, as in [Quarter:A].
  • Bracketed prose is printed as you wrote it. [12:30] stays a clock time and [Note: continued] stays an aside, because a bare number is not a column name and prose is what puts a space after the colon.

The format itself is not applied — the value prints as the column holds it, so format the column upstream if it needs thousands separators or a date layout.

The Columns tab maps the source columns available to the report piece.