Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi,

Noticed an issue in the Browse tools, specifically if you’ve run a module once, where browse tools are displaying information, and then you add new browse tools into the process (without clicking run yet). What I’m seeing is if I’m looking at the “existing” Browse that is showing data, and then click directly onto a Browse tool that was added after the run (not remembering I just added it), the “new” Browse tool is showing the previous Browse tools info, I literally have to click on the canvas, and then back to the new Browse tool for Alteryx to recognized there isn’t any data to display in it yet. My point being it can be misleading to the user if they don’t recognize the wrong info is being displayed (because as you click back & forth between the two, the data stays the same, making the user think the issue is in the process rather than just the display, can waste a lot of time backtracking for no reason). I’ve seen this behavior over at least the past 3 engine updates, just FYI.

We are limited to vertical and horizontal flow charts.

Being able to move the green entrance and exit nodes to vertical or horizontal positioning in the same chart would aid creating more efficient flow layouts.

The developers should check out Factorio too. Quite a few idea in there on flow charting.

EG:

It would be nice to have the expression box (found in formula tools etc.) and the join selection (found on joins etc.) as interface tools.

Could the workflow name be retained when browsing for a YXZP save location instead of blanking it out as soon as you change folders?

When you have multiple workflows open in tabs and want to rearrange them, it's kind of hard to tell where the tab is. In Firefox and Chrome, as examples, the tabs move around as you drag - if you drag a tab left, the tab next to it will slide to the right. In Tableau, a line with an arrow appears in the location where the tab will be dropped. But in the Alteryx interface, the new location of the tab is not so obvious. A line or something at the destination point would be great!

I often find when building a big workflow that I need to cancel its running in order to tweak something, but I still want to know which element was making it slow/crashing the workflow.

What would be useful in this circumstance is for the performance profiling to work even on partially finished (e.g. cancelled) workflows. It could just display a message reminding that this is a percentage of things that have run so far.

This is an interface issue but I wish Alteryx can allow user to scroll across the ribbon toolbar (e.g. In/Out, Prep, Join, Spatial tools...) when the toolbar is active.

That is, for example, when I click on "Transform" and notice my tool is not there, I can quickly scroll my mouse to move to other toolsets. Microsoft Office is a best practice for this and I think this will make it much efficient to locate tools.

It may just be me, but after I upgraded to 2018.2, the Table/Query edit window doesn't take up the full window when I maximize the parent window. 

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, maybe it's just me.  See attached.

Create a standardized Mailbox application that could bolt onto Alteryx Server, to handle incoming attachments from sources like a Service Desk (Service Now for example) and other applications.

Essentially anything that regularly exports data in the form of an emailed attachments to which Alteryx could, using a series of predefined user rules and a designated email address, put those attachments into various directories ready for processing by automated Alteryx workflows.

This would save a huge amount of time as people currently have to manually drag and drop files. At least the on board Alteryx designers here haven't been able to come with a solution. Would also save any messy programming around systems like Outlook and bending any security issues within those systems. Many, many other applications have this simple feature built in to their products, especially service desks. I believe there would be a huge benefit to this very simple bolt on.

I have been creating tools that access API data that needs a valid token that does expire.  I use iterative macros because I sometimes need to do offsets and loop around but I also need to confirm that the token is still valid and there is a limit of how many time you can generate a token on a run so I don't want to regenerate the token on each loop.  I sometimes can use the filter tool to accomplish this goal but I have to do some weird place holder stuff so it does not error if no data is coming through.  A nice to have would be if you could have it configure like you do the radio button input to say if value is YES then keep this part of the workflow on if value is "NO" then turn off this sections.

Hi, as a person with a mapping background, I love that Alteryx added zoom & pan abilities. The hold ctrl + mouse wheel zoom is great! Also, the hold space to pan is great as well. My only issue is this function should still work if the process is running, can you implement?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to pick results from a drop down, based on the up-stream tools in the workflow? I had this situation many times, where I had to create a complex, chained app, just because the tools connected to the interface can't run before the interface tools are displayed to the end user.

For example, imagine an app, that based on what column it sees, it lets you drop one by just picking it from a drop down. It would open many development opportunities, and decrease the number of chained apps we need to build.

Hi!

Under User Settings, if you could add options to change what Alteryx shows in the tool configuration window. Currently, it shows Field, Type, Size, Rename, Description. I've been using Alteryx for almost 20 years, I've never used the Description field for anything. If Alteryx provided the option to remove it from the view for users who never use it, then the Rename field would no longer get truncated, which is a field I think is more widely utilized.

Idea to have the option to include the workflow "meta info" (last tab of the workflow configuration when clicking on the cavas) when printing the workflow.

The Meta Info desciption and author sections would be particularly of value. Currently on the long file name is embedded in the header.

Alteryx currently shows 100% in the profiling of spatial fields in the results window, regardless of if there are rows with missing spatial features. I opened a ticket about this & was told it is expected behavior.

Therefore, I submit the idea that the profiling for spatial fields should give an accurate profile of the field, & if there are nulls in the field, it should identify that column isn't 100% OK and show the % of records that have null values, like the profiling does for every other column in workflows.

Thank you!