Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Problem: The visual nature of Alteryx is one of its key selling points. The idea is to make work flows understandable. But when you're building something complicated, the lines cease being a helpful visualization and become a confusing mess instead. Lines cross each other. Lines cross out annotations. I know that there's wireless connections, but using too many of those makes the data flow hard to trace. So I spend time moving tools and boxes around, trying to get lines to cooperate, instead of chasing that thrill of solving. 

Solution: Users should be able to click the line and place an anchor which affects the line just like a tool would, but without doing anything to the data. It would just be a little point, not a full tool.  That way I could make the lines dodge my annotations without placing needless select tools or moving everything around. It could be located in the Documentation tab. 

Thanks for reading,

BG

At first I was going to suggest a new tool, but I think this works better as a configuration item.  Some users, myself included, develop workflows with several containers intended to allow portions of the workflow to be turned on and off for the purpose of debug, more efficient development, etc.  Managing which containers are enabled and disabled can become cumbersome and time-consuming.

I propose a new tab in the Workflow Configuration to allow the user to easily enable/disable containers.  The Container configuration tab would list all containers by their tool number and caption. Each container would also have a state slider (Enabled/Disabled) that would show the current state of the container.    The user could click any container's state slider to enable/disable as desired.  An "all" slider that enabled/disabled all containers would also be helpful. 

This enhancement would centralize container management and save developers a lot of time.

Thanks for your consideration.

An Alteryx workflow can have a lot of text in it. You can rename individual tools, add annotations to them and use comment boxes to write explanations of what the workflow is doing. The idea I would like to advocate is to have a search function built into Alteryx to find words within any of these text inputs.

Thank you,

James

I am frequently using comments within my containers to tell an engaging story to my business Audience about the workflow I have built. However, whenever I start adding, removing, moving tools etc within containers these comments don't remain static within the relative position of the container and drift into positions that I have to manually adjust. 

From a time saving perspective it would be great if I could:

1. fix the position of comment within a container and

2. Group comments in a way similar to how you can group objects in Visio and Photoshop

How I use comments in Alteryx

Hi,

I am wondering if it is possible to add search function in the browse tool/preview results. It would be easier to locate the key words and not necessarily to add filter for checking and re-run the workflows for extra number of times.

Another thing is about the connectors, is it possible to allow manual adjustment on the connecters or the positions of the tool container? It would be great to adjust the lines when handling complex workflows.

Thanks.

Kenneth

Hi,

I have 2 simple ideas that would help me a little bit while working with the explorer box: 

• I think it would be amazing if we could pick the Internet Browser while using the Explorer box. 

While opening certain websites, I am getting this information: 

I know probably the answer to it isn't so simple, but that would give us a little bit extra flexibility while using Explorer box. 

My goal is to open a word or excel file with specific documentation. If I were able to use a newer browser, I could easily open a file with a link to a webpage. 

• Second, can we give the Explorer box a header similar to what we got in the containers? The address bar does not always give us information about what the explorer box shows and a small extra header that we can configure would add some additional clarification

Alternatively, if I could merge a comment tool with the Explorer box tool that would also work.

How about the ability to minimize or maximize all containers on your workflow, perhaps with a context menu option? It would make sorting through large workflows easier.

I often search for a tool on the canvas using control find and the tool number. If the tool is already in the visible pane, Alteryx highlights the tool with a faint dotted box. The problem is that I often have hundreds of tools that are visible and I have to constantly hunt around the canvas to locate the highlighted tool. Please update the control find settings so that when you use control find, Alteryx centers the current view on that exact tool. That way your eye can scan the middle of the canvas and locate the tool every time without this wasted effort searching for the tool outline. 

A request, to have a screen shot auto generated as like tableau have.

When we want to share/document the workflow, people has to use third party tools to get the screen shots. I believe its worth to have a screenshot as thumbnails, like tableau has as part of the twb files.

I'm sure we can do this with snipping tools, but i believe its worth to auto-generate an thumbnails and have as part of the alteryx files when user save the document as like tableau does.

thanks

arasu.b

Currently, users are unable to export only the annotations contents.

Requested change: Please add an option to export just the annotation content for an entire workflow. 

This would be useful when Tax reviewers need to include the workflow preparers' comments in the tax compliance review file.

It would be helpful to redirect Help Documentation searches to the latest version number.  When Googling problems I often get help page links that are for version 9.5 while I'm on version 11.7.  I'll usually change the version number in the URL to get to the right documentation.  It would be great if the version <11 documentation would automatically port forward to the current documentation with the option to go to older documentation for users on those versions.

I am in the process of thoroughly documenting my workflows should someone else need to run them. However, I find a lot of my time is having to adjust font style, font size, colors, comments, etc. for each of the items I'm notating. It would be far easier to have the ability to set up a custom scheme that I could apply overall to the workflow that would change all of those attributes to my workplace standards. Sort of like how you can define a style in Microsoft Word to use repeatedly, this scheme would include comment boxes, tool containers and any other means of notating the workflow.

I love using containers, but depending on how I am moving around the workflows or trackpad (when traveling) I find it hard to navigate quickly getting a container on the canvas between either add a container from the tool palette or having to highlight the tools and right-click for menu navigation to add the container. This ranks up there with the hotkeys for aligning the tools which make for quick work of making the workflow look organized and presentable. 

When you select a tool you get a nice little outline that calls out that you have in fact selected that tool. When you select a comment, you have to look at your configuration to see which comment you have clicked on. It seems silly to have to actually read something in another part of the screen in order to know you've clicked on the proper thing. 

As I have a lot of documentation to write on my Alteryx process, I would like to simple copy the lower table from the Visual Query Builder :

It would be very helpful to have an output of the workflow into a step by step document. so someone who does not have access to Alteryx can undestand the steps taken to create the flow hence the result or output.

I try to use the Comment tool for documentation within workflows for team members (and my future self when I have to revisit it months after I built it). It would be helpful to be able to use markdown formatting inside the tool.

This might even encourage more documentation. *fingers crossed*

Hi there,

the Snowflake documentation only refers to connection strings which use a DSN such as this page Snowflake | Alteryx Help which refers to the connection string as odbc:DSN=Simba_Snowflake_JWT;UID=user;PRIV_KEY_FILE=G:\AlteryxDataConnectorsTeam\OAuth project\PEMkey\rsa_key.p8;PRIV_KEY_FILE_PWD=__EncPwd1__;JWT_TIMEOUT=120

However - for canvasses which need to be productionized on Alteryx Server - it is critical to use dsn-less connection strings so that the canvasses can be deployed and run on any worker node without having to set up DSNs on every worker node.

A DSN-less connection string looks like this: 

ODBC:DRIVER={SnowflakeDSIIDriver};UID=UserName;pwd=Password;WAREHOUSE=compute_wh;SERVER=server.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com;SCHEMA=PUBLIC;DATABASE=NewTestDB;Staging=local;Method=user|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

Please could you consider making an update to the help texts to provide and describe a DSN-free connection string as well as the DSN driven connections?

Many thanks

Sean

The Explorer tool looks glitchy when you initially drop it on the canvas and I think its because it is trying to access the internet.  We already have temp folders in the Alteryx programs folder and it would be cool if the initial file reference is local- so its FAST.