Alteryx Community Ideas

The 2021 Alteryx INSPIRE conference wrapped up this week. There were lots of inspiring presentations. Along the way I picked up the latest Tips & Tricks document prepared by Stephane Portier. This title has been a regular INSPIRE feature at past conferences and each issue contained a mix of valuable secrets and shortcuts to make the Alteryx experience even better.

This time the title is a little misleading. What Stephane has created is a very complete and organized guide to best practices for developers working with the Alteryx Developer application.

Stephane makes a strong case for developers to take the extra effort and attention needed to create robust, well documented and maintainable workflows that will evolve over time as requirements change and data sources morph.

He has drawn attention to the specific features and approaches that lead to the creation of structured workflows that can be easily understood and audited.  He provides guidance on techniques that work to maximize quality deliverables, yet minimize the effort needed to get there.  It is a gem.

Everyone wanting to do serious work with Alteryx Designer should keep this document handy.

I have attached a copy and encourage you to read it from end to end.

I encourage the editors of the Community to give this document a prominent position on the site. In addition, to encourage best practices across the community,  I can imagine a contest being created where the winners would be those who could best demonstrate following the advice given in this guide.

It's related with the "Discussions".

I noticed that we do not have any section to add TAGS or Labels while replying to a post.

Something could be added like below:

Within Alteryx Interactive Lessons, there are a variety of types of interactive components. When the videos require the learner to type text before moving forward, the text must be correct, or else the video will not continue playing. The learner can click the "next" button (or the video's next main learning objective from the menu, depending on the video type), but this sometimes skips immediately sequential parts of the video. 

Most of the time, it's easy to figure out the correct text. However, there are a handful of instances where I could not figure out the correct text, even though I'm familiar with how to use Alteryx interactive lessons after 7+ hours of learning. I couldn't tell how much of the lesson I skipped after clicking "next", and these particular videos (App List Box and App File Browse) didn't have transcripts or a submit button with the text entry activity. 

In Alteryx interactive lessons with text entry activities, I would love the option to either:

- click a button to manually override these text entry activities and move on to the very next video segment, or

- click a button to automatically populate the correct answer so the video will continue

This button could have a time delay so that it would only appear after 10 or so seconds of wrong answer, or set to appear after a certain number of attempts. 

For example, from the analytic app List Box lesson, here is the text entry activity.

Deleting all of the auto-populated text but "DFW", "JFK" didn't work for me. I tried different variations of it with spacing (the white instruction text has an additional \s between "DFW" and ,) but ultimately ended up clicking the "next" button and skipping the inaccessible portions of the lesson. I realize the information I missed can be found within documentation or experimentation in Alteryx, but I'm sure there are learners who are not as comfortable with these alternatives yet! The manual override button could go right above the "next" button and would help learners who struggle to find the correct answer for a text entry like this.

Thank you for your consideration! I'm so grateful for the time the Alteryx team has spent creating these lessons, and I look forward to watching more in the future!

As of right now, at the end of every interactive lesson and learning path, we have a quiz that is not more than 5 questions. To further solidify the learning, I think it would be a great value add if we can add a challenge (just like the weekly challenges) at the end of every 3 or 4 interactive lessons or learning path. The idea is to solve the challenge using everything we learnt from those lessons.

Problem:  We are finding many discussion posts solutions that either are exactly the same as a previous solution on the same question or slightly different and in addition they are being marked as solutions. This doesn't help the community if there is no premium on either expanding significantly on the previous answer or answering completely differently but also correctly. Users are being rewarded on just posting an answer not on posting a thoughtful, useful, and correct answer.

Solution: Stack overflow as an example handles this quite nicely in that they offer many different responses but also with the ability to upvote OR downvote a response. This would radically improve the responses along with the metrics that guide many other programs in play on the community.

Nice podcast on Accessibility! I recently passed my Core Certification and I am a frequent user of the interactive videos which are great, so thank you. I love that there are transcripts on these, as I learn best by reading.

Have you considered making the playback speed adjustable on these resources? On audiobooks I usually slow it down to .75 or .8 speed and it's a big help, especially when I don't want to miss an important word or concept. I believe Netflix is also adding speed adjustment options. I know that there are people with auditory processing disorders that could probably benefit from a feature like that as well.  

Thanks!

StellaBon

Hi,

When trying to help someone on the Community, answer may differ depending on installed version.

It could be useful to know display -if agreed- the product(s) and version(s) owned by someone to make interactions more efficient. Example: files for Python tool would not be placed in the same folders depending on the version.

Pros:

- Helps with providing answers adapted to user's context

Cons:

- If user upgrades her/his version then post will lose its context

Thanks,

PaulN

In user profile, users could add how many hours a week Alteryx has saved them.

Great for marketing!

More vlogs on the usage of all Alteryx tools will be awesome. Some tools do not have example of its usage so more documentations most especially video documentations (vlog)  will be helpful

First of all, I want to say that I am very much enjoying the Academy Interactive Lessons. I would like to request that, upon completion of a lesson, the icons for the tools used in the lesson be added to the tile for quick visual reference. It seems simple in the example below, but would be helpful in the later lessons that use 2+ tools to execute actions.

I think it would be great to have badge(s) for the interactive lessons. They are a really great tool for people to learn about the tool, so badges could recognize folks who've invested the time to complete it.

Can we have a dedicated section on the community for just Tips and Tricks where people can post tips and tricks that they would have discovered ? This could be a short video or a screenshot with some description.

Similar to the weekly challenge camping badges that are given based on the number of completed by a member , there should be badges given to members who submit ideas for weekly challenges that in turn get accepted ! I know all of us get some sort of kick out of those badges and this will definitely encourage more members to contribute to the weekly challenge 🙂

I'd really like to see a data release schedule posted right where data download page is.  I have searched for "data release schedule" on Alteryx site, but nothing pop up.  I think it is somewhere as I have seen it before, but it is not easily found.  And I'd like this to be a regular production post so we don't have to look or ask for it every year/quarter/month.  That way, I don't have to keep emailing if there will be any data refresh to fulfillment or client services.  The schedule should be posted right where we are looking for data.  

Closed captioning would be a welcomed feature for the Interactive Lessons in Academy. This would enhance user experience and enables those with hearing impairments to learn the Alteryx software.

We currently have ideas boards for Designer; promote; Connect and server; along with this Community ideas board.

Could we please add an ideas board for the SDK; which would be the place to log ideas for:

- SDK for formulae (I'm looking at you @jdunkerley79 ) 

- SDK for using the API in various APIs across the product stack

- SDK for building custom plugins (HTML; C++; Python)

That would also align well with the fact that there's already a discussion board for the SDK

Pinned discussions appear at the top of the Discussions page.  The current 3 pinned posts haven't had a reply in 2,3,15 months.  Would it be possible to move pinned posts to the right side of the screen, along with Top Solution Authors and Top Starred Posts?  This would provide more space at the top of the page for active discussions.

It would be a large convenience for Alteryx to offer one sign-in with Microsoft Azure? (i.e. if someone is logged into the EY network and navigated to Alteryx.com they would automatically be signed in). This would be particularly useful for strategic partners of Alteryx as they could better track who is certified and who has taken which Alteryx Academy trainings as all users would map to the work email.

It would be great to see an email with the Top Idea Submissions at the End of the Year sent out to everyone who is registered on the Community to encourage participation going into the next year. 

Ex:

What feature do You most want added to Alteryx? Vote before January 14th.

We have added over X number of features in 2018 and are looking for your input for 2019 features (see below for some of the top ideas currently on the community):

1. Programmatic Detour

2. Between Operator Function

3. Containers should move other tools when Expanding Collapsing

4. Append YXDBs

5. SQL syntax highlighting

....