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My Top KNIME Tips — Part 1

Tips and tricks to help you KNIME better

Published in

Low Code for Data Science

3 min readApr 6, 2022

As a massive fan of KNIME, I have accrued dozens of happy and deeply fulfilling hours in KNIME. Over this time, I have picked up some tips and tricks that I want to share with fellow KNIME aficionados. Here they are:

Fuzzy Search

Finding nodes was a bit of a challenge for my first months using KNIME, as I had to type the name of the node exactly as it was named in the node repository. So if I were missing a hyphen or I typed the words in the wrong order, I was not able to find the node.

But wait! KNIME has a fuzzy search option for this exact reason. Clicking on the search icon activates fuzzy search mode, making it easier to find nodes.

You can also view the video below for a demonstration.

Auto Align

I am obsessed with symmetry, this is why I love that KNIME has the ability to auto align. Here are some nodes that I intentionally misarranged.

Here are the same nodes after performing vertical and horizontal auto alignment.

You can find the auto alignment options in the top menu bar, next to the zoom drop down box. See a demo below.

Auto Attach Nodes to the Workflow

We all know that dragging nodes to the canvas is one of the joys of KNIME, but sometimes, you are in a time crunch and need to move a little bit faster. Turns out, that if you have a node selected and you double click on a node in the node repository, it gets automatically connected to the node you had selected in your workflow! You can find a demo in the first 30 seconds of the next video.

Look and Feel, and View Options

There is a lot you can do in KNIME to change the look and feel to fit your preferences. There is also a ton of hidden gems in the output table view of nodes. I cover all of these in the video below about 30 seconds in and onward. Tips covered include:

Enabling curved connectors
Hiding gridlines
Resetting your perspective
Increasing the font in the table output view
Searching in the table output view
And more!

Increasing KNIME’s Memory Usage Allowance

If you need KNIME to do a lot of heavy lifting, and your system allows for it, you can enable KNIME to have access to more of your system’s RAM resources. You can learn how to do that with the video below.

That’s all the tips for now! But I still have more tips to share, so be on the look out for part 2.

Cheers!