Alteryx Community Ideas

So - one of the common things that I do almost every few days - is to pass on an article on the community to someone who I work with.  

Right now - the only way to do this is to share it using the share button (which then goes via e-mail or twitter etc) or otherwise create a personal message, or even worse you can do a reply with "plus person XXX" but this just creates noise on the thread

Could we add 3 features to the community to make this MUCH quicker:

- Share with community user/group of users

- Allow me to create my own group of users like "Admin team" or "Designer users" or "my direct team" which I can forward the message to

- create a notification in the notification section for shared articles

This would make sharing content MUCH faster.

Hey there,

Please forgive me if I'm the only one who works like this - but one of my standard processes with the alteryx community is to frequently scan new posts, and then make a note to come back to the ones that either I want to respond to; or spend learning time on etc.

The way I currently do this is to take the URL, and pop it into Google Keep - I have 3 google Keep lists:

- One for Learning

- One for community stuff (general responses)

- one for my immediate priorities (generally stuff that I owe someone a personal response on).

Not sure if anyone else would find this useful, but i'd really value the ability to do this within the alteryx community site itself.  What I'm thinking of is:

a) mark a topic as "Add to list" and then like on the Amazon Wishlist I can select which list

b) I can then print out a digest of the posts that are in a particular list for reading on the train / car / flight etc

c) this list becomes my 3rd notfication list then - currently we have notifications for alerts; personal messages - we can then add this as a 3rd item.

Essentially this could work like youtube "Save for later".

Anyone else find this useful - if so, give it ia star :=_

Happy Wednesday

Sean

Sometimes we end up posting duplicate replies. There is no way to delete it. The only option is to now remove all the contents and post an empty reply.

It happened to me today:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Weekly-Challenge/Challenge-77-Extending-Spatial-Lines/m-p/71679#M13...

Hi there,

In the community we have the concept of user ranks ( @JulieH published the launch notes her: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-Alteryx-Community/User-Ranks-FAQs/td-p/10 ), and we also have the idea of community roles (e.g. Alteryx Partner; Chief Technology Officer; etc)

Could we separate these out into two different fields?   reason for asking is that folk like @MarqueeCrew and @jdunkerley79 have worked hard for their Magnetar rank, but because Mark is also a partner this is now hidden (because it's overridden with his partner status).    It would be good to see the entire community ranked with the user ranking system, irrespective of role - and then the role provides different privileges and permissions and may be a tuple (e.g. Mark could be an "Alteryx Partner" as well as "Alteryx Ace" as well as "Alteryx Community Super" - James could be "ACE"; "Lead formula innovator" and "Alteryx Community Super")

How is Alteryx a spelling error on the Community? Can we adjust it?

Hi all,

@Joe_Makopointed out to me yesterday by a PM that the export & package tool for Alteryx has a known defect, where the nested macros (a macro inside a macro) don't export properly.

That set me thinking - what's the best way for the community to log defects, and I'm wondering if there's a place for a section on this forum for defect reports?   That would also make it easier for the Alteryx team to parse out defects (which folk like @Ned care very deeply about) from other types of posting.

This would have to be heavily curated though - in my experience, a large number of defects raised for systems I've managed over the years have not been defects, but actually users not understanding the tools - however these did give us very valuable insight into usability; training; etc.

So -  if we had a "Potential defects" section, and if the more senior members of the community had the ability to curate along with alterxy, we should be able to do something good here:

Curate actions needed:

- move some to "Ideas" if they are new functionality

- move some to one of the discussions thread if they are actually a usage question

- Escalate some to the technical leads at Alteryx

- the alteryx team could workflow them in the same way as the ideas but with an additional step of "replicatable example pending from user"

Let me know what you think?

Hi all,

In working through older posts, it's apparent that many have been orphaned by the author who may no-longer visit the Alteryx community site.

To check this - could we add "last logged in date" to the user's profile card (screenshot below)?   That would make it very easy to see if we should follow up with the user to progress to a solution, or just close the thread.

Cheers

Sean

Hi all,

Reading through the product ideas raised by the community - it strikes me that there are significant clusters.   Two jump out - improvements to date/time handling & parsing, and caching.

This is not a suggestion about either of these topics, but a question about how we look at and structure these ideas.   Let's take the date-time ones (full list is below) as a worked example:

- there are 23 distinct ideas (or 22 if you exclude the one about generating random dates) which relate to the treatment (mainly parsing; formatting or constructing) of dates & times

- None of these individually has enough votes to get them onto the "hot ideas" list - however when you look in aggregate across them, the theme of "standardizing and enriching date-time processing" is probably one of the hottest topics at the moment.

Two suggestions:

Tagging: If we are able to spot these patterns - and then create a tag that is related to this (in this case "DateTime handling") - the product team would probably be able to do some pretty interesting analytics.

Grouping: In order to allow people to spot these BEFORE they log the next idea which is trying to achieve the same thing - is it worth the community creating a grouped-up idea which then becomes persistent if there is a clear trend; and we can link out to these ideas?   For example an idea saying "standardize & Enrich treatment of date time", which then becomes a sticky item at the top of the forum so that folks don't have to search for pages to see if their idea is a duplicate.

NOTE: this second one (grouping) will also save time for the product team because they won't have to spend as much time flagging duplicates...

Hope this makes sense - as always, happy to help in thinking about potential solutions.

Note: the 23 ideas related to date-time treatment are captured below (as a worked example), and the authors of these ideas have been tagged out of courtesy

@DultonM @braxtone @Philip @AshokBhatt @CSchrader @dawid_nawrot @jdunkerley79 @Joe_Lipski @ChadB @nicholas_carstens @GGuenther @AndrewW @RachelW

Hi @LeahK

To really power the cleanup - what would be tremendously helpful is data on unsolved problems.

I think that this could take 2 forms:

a) a table format (like @JoeM does for the weekly exercises) - this would be fairly trivial to auto-generate this from the underlying data rather than hand-crafting - and can include links directly to the unsolved item

b) a grouped data structure, where we could see a few things:

      - Unsolved items by requestor (that allows us to group and target the biggest populations first)

      - some indicator of whether this requestor is still active in logging into the community (no point in chasing someone that hasn't logged in since 2013)

      - Links directly to the thread item

      - Last post date on the thread (no point in chasing someone to mark this as solved if it just happened 2 days ago)

That would enable us to go through the full population and more effectively work on getting the remaining items marked as solved or closed - and it would also allow us to track our progress as a metric of success day-by-day!

:-) I feel a data-driven-cleanup-project coming on - with as-of snapshots; trend graphs etc.   Very exciting stuff!

Hi @LeahK

On of the challenges with the discussion board is that every-so-often you come across one like this:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Salesforce-Output-Dreaded-INVALID-FIELD-e...

or like this

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Can-the-Drive-Distance-Tool-output-a-rout...

Where this may be beyond the technical ability of the community team, and really needs someone from within the Alteryx Dev team who knows the internals of the tool to provide a technical response.   

However - unlike the "meet the community" post - there's no similar idea for the technical folk so we don't know where to send these.

I don't think that relying on you and your team to spot these kind of items is a workable / scalable answer either - there's just too many posts on the fora for you to read every one and make this kind of determination.

I can think of three ways to address this:

a) create a similar post for "meet the tech team" to identify 4 or 5 technical people who are willing to jump onto these more technical items (like MattD; Chad; Sophia / Sofia), and then when we come across these one of us can just tag the relevant technical person onto the thread.

b) we add this to the new functionality that you're thinking about under "report content" - we add another option called "escalate to technical folk"

c) we create a generic @ sign for something like @TechnicalTeamNeeded where when we spot one of these, we can then just reply and tag the technical team, which would put this into the right people's queues.

The vast majority of questions and issues can be solved by the community, so I'm keen that whatever solution we come up with doesn't deluge your technical folk - but at the same time it's important that we create a channel for the small subset that need extra assistance, to be able to get these into the right hands without your tech teams having to trawl through hundreds of community posts daily.

Hi there,

On several of the challenges, we are limited from attaching exported solutions (it only allows workflow files).    Additionally - it would be helpful to be able to attach flows & data files to PMs and to replies on ideas to avoid having to use drop-box etc.

could we change the settings on these discussion threads and on the PM area to allow this?

many thanks

Sean

Hi there Alteryx team,

Firstly, thank you for the care that you put into nurturing and tending this community!

Looking at the badges - it seems that it may be useful to discriminate between posts made in the Ideas sections; vs. posts made in the discussion or the Weekly Challenge section.

My thinking here is that some folk will be able to make a huge contribution in new product or community ideas - while others may be assisting the community with solutions; suggestions; replies etc.   Both are valuable and both are very different ways to contribute.

:-) additionally - like you've done with the weekly challenges - we could make this fun (e.g. use light-bulb or invention-themed badge icons for folks who are prolific idea generators).

Thanks again for all you do

best

Sean

Hi there,

It would be helpful on the discussion boards to be able to filter in 2 specific ways:

- Filter for unsolved questions (so that folk can focus on helping people who are still looking for an answer without having to trawl through all the answered ones)

- Filter for only threads that have updates  (similar to an inbox - I only want to see new items so that every day I can keep up with the traffic without having to remember if I've read a particular post or not)

I apologise if these capabilities exist already - if they do exist, then perhaps I'll alter this suggestion to read "help to make these features easier to locate".

Many thanks

Sean

Hi there,

The login to the community goes through the Gallery - which is a problem for folks in locked-down corporate environments (in our firm, the gallery.alteryx.com URL is locked down so that there can be no leakage of intellectual property) - as a result, none of us can log into the community site (Community.alteryx.com) and sign in as ourselves from work.

Would it be possible to replicate the login URL so that if I'm logging in from the Community it punches me through to Community.alteryx.com/login instead of Gallery.alteryx.com?   You could use the same authentication and the same credentials in the background, but at least then we'd be able to log into the community from the office and contribute to questions and discussions?

Thank you

Sean

Alteryx has to make a lot of little decisions that have a big impact on users such as...

• What should the default data type be in the new Formula tool?
• Where in the menu should Manage Data Connections Be?
• Should the Comment tool be single or double click before you start typing?

Rather than Alteryx making those decisions, why not let the Community decide! A new polls section would allow the users to ultimately determine the look and feel of certain things in the Designer and make other contributions to the future of Alteryx.

If this is done, please make it a separate section (not a subset under discussions) so the purpose and impact are clear.

I think it would be great if there was a knowledge base section(or something similar) for any user to post random workflows that they find useful and want to share/solicit feedback from the community. Several posts from the last few weeks would fit well in this new category and sparked the idea: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/Polling-a-directory-for-changed-files/m-p/51019 by @N___ or https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/An-API-Client-for-Alteryx-Gallery-in-R/m-p/49464... by @michael_treadwell. Instead of having these great workflows buried/mixed in with all the questions, it would great if there was a single spot for people to post various workflows back to the community and get comments/feedback/enhancements from fellow community members. I think many more people would be open to sharing and commenting on posts like this if they had a spot to post them that is separate from all the Q&A style spots.

I am proficient in SQL and new to Alteryx; I see the answer to many of problems quite easily through the SQL language but want to know how to translate much of that to Optimal Alteryx workflows and would if there are alternative approach to the same thing in Alteryx I like to be able choose the path that is most compatible with my Alteryx skill set at the time eg take the path using an Alteryx Tool; a Function, RegEx or other.

Examples: 

- How would perform the equivalent of a GROUP BY and HAVING Clause 

SELECT A, Count(*)
FROM TABLE
GROUP BY A
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1

- How would I perform the Teradata SQL equivalent of QUALIFY, RANK, ROWNUM and PARTITION BY

- How would I assign a PRIMARY INDEX upon creation of a table using the Alteryx output without having to create the table myself using SQL on Teradata itself (this is necessary to mitigate unnecessary storage usage resulting from skew)

It would be very convenient if there was a button on posts (for the post author only) that would allow the author to auto re-post the question as a suggestion/feature request if it has gone unanswered for (2? 3?) days.

Probably not just a single click and done, but at least take the content and open a draft in the feature suggestion section.

Would love to have more flexibility to filter and/or sort the community discussions. It would be great to filter to just unsolved questions or unanswered questions etc...