Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
We had a very exciting week last week with our first ever Virtual Inspire conference, debuting the latest release, Build Breakthroughs in 2021.2! We introduced built-in data cleansing in the Interactive Results Grid to fix issues with whitespace, missing values, on top of sorting and filtering. We also released a brand-new Platform Software Development Kit (SDK), and the Computer Vision tools in the Alteryx Intelligence Suite.
What is even more exciting is to share with you your ideas that were implemented into the product! We count on our users to give us ideas and suggestions to make the product better; after all, you’re using it every day and we want that experience to keep getting better.
Your ideas, implemented in 2021.2:
- Allow Toolbar Save Button During Run thanks to @Kenda – the toolbar came back last year, and now you can click Save up there while your workflow is running.
- Paste Tool Inline using Ctrl + V thanks to @Jordken – copy and paste a tool right into the connection without right-clicking into a tool menu. We love it.
- Add Prefix to Field Names Focus thanks again to @Kenda – previously, when you used the 'Add Prefix to Field Names' option in the Select tool, the focus was on the checkbox. Now, it is inside the text box so you can start typing right away!
- Open an already converted macro input to regular input thanks to @Abisayi - in order to see what file was used as a Macro Input, right click on the Macro Input tool to convert it into a regular input in one step. No more copy/ pasting from a Browse tool.
- Pressing Right/Left arrow keys inside a text input tool should move to previous, next thanks to @Simha – when preparing data in the Text Input tool, you can now navigate to the next/previous cell upon pressing the right/left arrow keys. Up/ down works the same way.
- Right Click -> Create as Macro thanks to @KoryC – this feature has been a long time coming! Select all the tools that should be in the macro, right click, and have an option to "Convert to Macro." The option provides a prompt to choose an icon, change the file path of the new macro, then creates the new macro on your existing canvas, and opens the macro itself on a new canvas, while updating the necessary macro inputs and outputs automatically.
- Error message lookup thanks to @MarqueeCrew - as of the 2021.1 stable release, and 2021.2, we are now making many of the most common error messages in the output log into clickable links that open associated Community Knowledge Base articles. We are starting to update the error messages themselves for clarity, and actively working to add more error message links in upcoming releases.
- Improvement in properly recognizing PDF text no matter its rotation thanks to @EveSt – the PDF Input tool is now called the Image Input tool, and is part of our new Computer Vision tools within Intelligence Suite. It recognizes the orientation of the image input, and a whole lot more.
- Updates to the BigQuery tools to allow for Overwriting thanks to @CHRockhill - this tool now supports Append Existing and Overwrite table functionality! The Google BigQuery tools are available here on the Gallery, with many more upgrades.
Thank you to all our users who contribute ideas and please keep ‘em coming! We get new ideas every day, and your upvotes matter - cruise the Designer, Server, Promote, and Connect boards, thumbs-up ideas, and leave comments that support others' ideas. Your feedback is critical to this process. Every quarter is a new chance to be included in these Ideas blogs – come get your shout out!
The new version is available for download here: http://downloads.alteryx.com/. For more information about these features, plus fixed and known issues, check out the Release Notes.
