Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

when using switch formula as a more elegant way then if else

't' is not working in switch while it working in if then.

so i recommend to have a formula call True() and False() as excel to solve this issue. 

The Unique tool is likely lighter than the Summarize tool and extremely useful to identify and remove duplicates, however unlike the JOIN tool where one can select which fields are included in the output, the unique tool will return all fields regardless.

It would be extremely useful if the UNIQUE tool also featured a list of fields to be included or not in the output for users to select from, because many times, all we are trying to extract is the list of unique values from a given column in the dataset and the other fields are not needed, neither do they make sense in this particular type of operation.

Thanks!

I have a sales column in my dataset that includes both a dollar sign and a period (e.g., '$320,000.00'). When I use the data cleaning tool and select 'Remove unwanted characters' with the punctuation checkbox, it removes both the dollar sign and the period. However, I only want to remove the dollar sign. It would be great if @Alteryx could allow users to specify which character they want to remove after selecting the punctuation checkbox. Thanks!

Improve the user experience by enable search filtering options in browse tool result just as in the canvas. See attached pics.

Include a tool specific configuration to allow for the ability to turn off annotations on that specific tool instead of the global setting to turn them all off.

This would especially be useful for the SORT tool.

I find myself wasting multiple clicks in order to eliminate the annotations every time I insert a sort tool into my process flow, since it is rare when I actually need to include an annotation.

In conjunction with the "First N% of Rows" and "Group by column (optional)" features, an additional option that would be great to have would be to tell the tool to take at least 1 record per group. If I am telling the tool to take the first 3% of records and grouping by a field, but one of the groups only has 5 records, it won't return any records for that group, as 3% of 5 is .15, so the tool rounds that down to 0. If I could also choose an option for the tool to always round up, that would also be sufficient.

In the formula tool, you can generate uniform random values using the RAND() function.

I would like to have similar functionality to get normal random values by calling RANDN().

As a workaround, the values can be produced from a Python tool using 

numpy.random.randn()

Python documentation on numpy.random.randn.

The full script below produces 100 random normal values in a column called 'Normal_Rand'.

The zip file has both a direct workflow and macro solution to produce the random normal values.

Hello all,

My idea is very simple, and this is most likely I'm used to do. After highlighting the fields in the select tool, the next action is to click Options and to apply what to do. My idea is just after highlighting, right click on mouse button to go exactly on Options menu. Just a simple right click. I think this behavior is most likely comes from Microsoft, I'm used to select multiple lines or cells and with right click to do the next action. It's a simple, but powerful. What do you think?

Albert

The Directory tool should also retrieve the author/creator name of a file along with an audit trail of anyone that made changes to the file. The audit trail option may need to be a different preparation tool but the information would be useful.

I received a "string variable switched type" error on the filter tool performing a basic filter on the value column of "is not empty" after a transpose tool.  The value column is datatype of  V_String 255.  So even though the values are null, blank, number, text, it is all string as per the data type column flowing in.  When switching from basic to custom with formula: IsEmpty([value]) same error.   BUT, when using the Formula Tool to generate a new column for true/false there is no error. Also the Fitler Tool works as expected with IsNull on this dataset.

Please look into the isEmpty code in the Filter tool so that it behaves correctly.

Please note that pre-splitting the data with the isEmpty flag column using the formula tool, applying IsEmpty Basic Filter  to the True and To the False both worked without incident.  

What would be nice is if there is an error in the filter tool that it would output those to it's own stream.  Something like - True (T), False (F), Error (E).

The default variable size is a V_WSTRING of size 1073741823.  If no one catches this, it uses up the memory on the server.  Could the default be smaller?

It would be fantastic if there was auto-formatting for the Formula Tool (and even other tools, possibly).  The auto-formatting would function similar to Python PEP-8 style, either 4 spaces or an indent on each new line.  This could also be expanded to modify the existing autocomplete functionality of an IF statement with appropriate formatting.

Auto-Complete Current State Example:

IF c THEN t ELSE f ENDIF

Proposed Example:

IF c

    THEN t

    ELSE f

ENDIF

This would dramatically increase readability for lengthy nested IF statements or other complicated functions within the Formula tool.  It would also save a tremendous amount of time when we have to go back and format those functions later.

Why we don't add the search feature in the Multi-row formula same as the formula tool?

Currently, Dynamic Select and Multi-Field Formula tools both have the option to select fields by type (like Numeric, String).

It is however not currently possible to select which fields will be selected by using a formula in the Multi-Field Formula tool.

Due to having to use at least two tools to select which fields I need and apply formula (optionally changing the data type),

- I first Dynamic Select the fields by the suffixes I have in the field name which specify the data type (like Name_String, Spends_Double)

- I then apply the Multi-Field Formula (at least trim the whitespaces from the fields due to working with CSV files containing fixed whitespace in fields) and change the data type if necessary,

- Finally, I Join Multiple the fields back using the RecordID field I previously added as a key.

This also changes the order of the data and there might be some scenarios where the user does not want the field order changed.

By embedding the Dynamic Select via Formula option to the Multi-Field Formula tool, it will become possible to select which fields will be subject to formula and (optionally) data type change in one tool as opposed to having to use many tools.

Add the ability in the select records tool to use formulas not just record numbers. 

Idea:

Similar to the Formula Tool how it shows an example based on the first record. Could the Filter Tool have a example based on the first record showing how the formula in the filter would handle that record? It would either show in an example field for the true sample or false sample based on the criteria. I feel this would be very useful for more complex formulas such as AND/OR.

Ex.

Filter Formula: [Count] <= 1

True Sample: [Blank]

False Sample: 4 (Value of first record which was filtered from [Count])

Need a tool that can remove nulls in 2 ways:

1. Remove rows with null values

2. Remove columns with null values

Save/Load Unique Key Tool Configuration – similar to saving/loading other tools configs  (ie: select, join, append, etc)

Functionality or Tool allowing to automatically interpret and change data into date type without using DateTime tool. This interpreter would be a little bit faster and more reliable solution than manually setting in DateTime tool.