Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Problem:
In large Alteryx workflows, renaming a column using a Select tool (or similar) causes downstream tools like Formula, Filter, Join, Sort, etc., to break or throw errors if they reference the old column name.
This means every time a column is renamed, I have to manually go through every tool that used the old name and update it - which is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

Proposed Enhancement:
Add a feature to automatically propagate field name changes across all tools in the workflow that reference the renamed field.

This could work similarly to how modern IDEs allow you to "rename variable" across an entire codebase, or how refactoring works in platforms like Tableau Prep or Power BI.

Benefits:

• Saves time when making structural changes to data schemas.

• Reduces human error caused by missing updates in some tools.

• Makes workflows more scalable and easier to maintain.

• Improves usability and development speed for all users, especially in large or collaborative workflows.

Search Box for Tools like Formula Tool where a drop down list of all columns is present to choose from the list. It might take quite a while to search for a specific column in a Formula tool when there is hundreds of columns in a data stream. This is quite an important case when we work with raw columns directly from an SAP extractor.

As part of the options of the select tool, it would be really helpful if the 'Change Field type of Highlighted Fields' included the Forced type which would detect for each highlight field, the current type, and change it to the forced version of that type. Currently we need to go through each column to achieve this, and with a lot of columns (that are not consistent across different sheets, so a .yxft is not suitable) this is a massive pain. It seems fairly straight forward to add this as an option called 'forced' or something alongside the other data types

In the regex tool, there is a checkbox called "copy unmatched text to output".

Unfortunately, if you are using regex from within the formula tool, this is not an option. It would be helpful if this could be added as an optional parameter in the regex formula i.e: 

REGEX_Replace(String, pattern, replace, icase=1, unmatched=1)

Without this, regex outputs can sometimes be confusing, as string characters not specified by the pattern (unmatched) appear in the output. This confusion would be alleviated with the optional parameter.

Anytime you create a formula in the formula tool, you get a data preview based on the values in the first row of data.  However, if you have a complex "IF c THEN t ELSEIF c2 THEN t2 ELSE f ENDIF" formula then the data combination that gives a TRUE result will likely exist on another row.  Therefore, you need to run the workflow, or place a filter tool upstream to isolate the specific row, to test if the formula result is correct.  

It would be easier if you could select the Input anchor of the Formula tool, then filter the data in the results window to isolate the row in questions, then the data preview would be based on that filtered data set.  I believe this would save a lot of time in the workflow development phase.

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!

Hello,

As of today, DCM is great to store credentials. But once we want to dive deeper in technicity, like using macros or Applications, it's really bad. One of the things I hate is that we can't retrieve any informations from the DCM connection, just the id. Not good for logs, really bad for understanding and have some conditional logic related to connection type or name.

Here an example

Nice, I managed to retrieve an id but I have no idea of what it means : what kind of connection? what's name?

Best regards,

Simon

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.

Currently when a unique tool is used, and a field is removed upstream then the workflow fails to move forward. If you have one or two unique fields being used then it is no big deal, but when you have a very complex workflow then you have to click into each one of those tools in order to update. This can be very problematic and creates a lot of time following all the branches that is connected after the 1st unique tool is used. My suggestion is to make this a warning instead of a fail or have an option to select fail or warning like the union tool is setup. This way people can decide how they want this tool to react when fields are removed. 

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.

Is it possible to add sort functionality to the Sample tool in Designer, similar to the 'Sample Based on Order' functionality in the Sample tool in Designer Cloud? This would cut down on the Sort + Sample tool combo in Designer!

Thanks!

The basic premise is this: 

Phantom spacing. Basically something that looks like it has spaces on Excel but is actually formatted as an indentation. 

Unfortunately, to read the indentation we will need either a VBA prep or read the XML inside. The latter of which is difficult. 

As to VBA, the general steps are to create an indentation formula in order to see the numbers, then go from there. The idea is credited to @clmc9601 as we discussed privately.

As of now, I do not see anyway to do this on Alteryx as a function or even expression. It would be very helpful especially reading trial balances or even Bloomberg outputs as they are formatted with indentation. 

Reading indentation from Excel or any other file within Alteryx will be much appreciated, especially in actuarial and finance spaces. 

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.

Hello All,

I believe there needs to be a new tool added to Alteryx. I am frequently encountering cases where I will have 0 data point feeding a workflow stream that causes my workflows to fail. Because of this, I am having to put in fail safes to keep this from happening.

There should be a tool that if there is no records that are passing into it, anything after that tool will not fail.

For an example, within a workflow I am using a dynamic input that will pull a dynamic file. The file is not always there and the workflow should be able to run if that file is there or not. If the dynamic tool and other tools would process 0 records without failing this would also solve the issue. 

I would be nice to have a tool that will  block off the work stream if there are 0 records passing through the tool.