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The New Column tool is one of the most versatile tools in Less. It allows you to create new columns based on the existing columns, static values, with syntax and using parameters. It can be used for almost any use case you can think of.

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Configuration

1

Column name

Input a new column name.
2

Syntax

It’s in the field that you use syntax to create your new column. You can do a lot of different things with it: column reference, functions, operations, parameters and static values. Check out the examples below to see a couple of examples. Note that if you create multiple new columns, you can reference the result of the previously added columns. Like this:
Notice how in the second column, we reference the test which was just created above. This is quite powerful, as you can chain multiple columns together and reduce the number of tools on your canvas.

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Example: Static Values

You can easily create new static values by using the syntax field. Here’s a couple of examples for different types of columns. Notice the double-quotes around the text literal.

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Example: Conversion to date and date difference

You can easily convert a column to a date and use date difference with the syntax field. Here’s an example of doing both simultaneously.

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Example: Coalesce and transforming to an integer

You can use coalesce to consolidate columns into a single column. It takes the first non-null value from the columns you specify.
In this example, row 2 and four in the nulls_col column are null, so we then take the first character from the right of the text_col and turn it into an interger. Finally, we mulitply it by 2000.

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Example: Working with parameters

You can also use parameters to create new columns. In the example below, we’ve done the following:
  1. Created a parameter called valueToDivideBy and given it an integer value of 5
  2. We use an IFF (conditional statement) function in the syntax
  3. First we say, if the nulls_col is null…
  4. …then give us the rounded float_col to one decimal and divide it by our valueToDivideBy (which is 5 in this case)
  5. …otherwise, create a NULL value
Row to becomes 0 because float_col is rounded to 0. Row 4 becomes 0.2 because float_col is rounded to 1 and then divided by 5. The rest become null because the nulls_col is not null.