Thoughts on Canvas Design.

Question

Hi everyone - I may be in the minority here, but does anyone else obsess over how their canvas/workflow looks? At times it can be distracting, but it's somewhat beneficial to me since it helps me keep my workflows organized and free of unnecessary tools. One thing I recently discovered is the use of a "Legend" which makes debugging large workflows much faster/organized.

Since Alteryx doesn't have any themes or dark mode, I tried to get as close to a theme as I could by leveraging the ability to save colors within the color palette. See mine below!

Is anyone else like this? Do you have a "theme" you typically follow? Let me know, I would love to discuss!

Alteryx Designer Canvas.png

rickey0830 · Answer

I'm definitely more self-conscious of how my workflow looks like if it is going to be passed off, or if it's going be used repeatedly. You mentioned Alteryx doesn't have a dark mode, but you can go into the canvas settings under your user settings and you can change the background color of the canvas to something darker! All that white space does strain the eyes after a while. One more cosmetic design choice that I stand by is using vertical orientation for all workflows, it feels more natural to scroll up and down rather than left to right, and feels a lot neater to this brain.

ChrisTX · Answer

We generally use the attached template, but many of our Joins and Unions end up in the Data Prep container.  I don't see much value in creating another container with a different color for a Join or Union, when the purpose of those tools is Data Prep.

Instead of a theme, we intentionally use differentiating colors, to make it easy to identify a container's general purpose.

Chris

Alteryx Workflow Template.yxmd

Superstore.xlsx