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.

The TO field (and I assume other fields) in the Email tool seem to have a 254 character limit - this should be increased heavily as there are many distribution lists that will go above this character limit!

• Solved: Email tool recipients list truncating emails - Alteryx Community
• Solved: Email Widget: Cut off all the emails in the "To" r... - Alteryx Community
• Re: Email Address Truncated in the "To" Field - Alteryx Community

A distribution list works but is not ideal. Thumbs up if you like this idea!

When working within the Table Tool, there are many options to help users format the width of their columns (i.e. Automatic, Fixed, or Percentage).

 

It would be nice to see an option added to disable word-wrapping.  Meaning, expand to encompass the header or data within the field so that each row is of uniform height regardless of the option:

 

 

Fixed:  The rest of the data would just be masked like in excel:

 

Percentage:  Same as fixed (above), but relative to the variable width...

 

Automatic:  Resizing to the required width, regardless.

• It would also be nice to have options under automatic, akin to constraints
  • Automatic, but with a maximum width of...
  • Automatic, but with a minimum width of....
• But regardless without word-wrapping

 

 

Why this matters:  When producing automation, especially for finalized outputs such as reports and tables; having maximum control over the output format is vital to ensuring downstream users don't have to continue to manipulate the output to suit their needs.  Maybe this isn't best practice, but when has customer demands ever taken a backseat to best practices!  😉

 

The Email tool does not send out e-mails after an error occurred in the workflow. Since this usually is a good thing, it sometimes would be helpful being able to send out e-mails also in case of errors.

In particular, I want to send out an e-mail with a detailed and formatted custom error message.

 

Thus, please add a check box "Also send mail in case of errors" which is off by default.

 

Side note: The Event "Send mail After Run With Errors" does not work for me because it is too inflexible. Just sending out the OutputLog is not helpful because the error message might be hidden after hundreds of rows.

 

This is a feature request based on my comment submitted here: Email Tool: Format "From" field to accommodate "Di... - Alteryx Community

 

It would be great to provide an option in the Designer Email Tool to allow us to specify a "Display Name" when sending emails.  The "Display Name" is a common part of the email specs listed here: RFC2822 - Section 3.4 (Address Specification) 

 

The email gateway/service that I'm using will send emails, but the "From" line will reflect only the email address.

 

For example, it will show an email as being from "john.smith@example.com" where I would love for it to show up as from "Smith, John".  This would make emails appear like other internal company emails in our company Outlook clients, and in general provides more useful flexibility for the Email tool. 

 

Many other email clients support using Display Name, but it appears that Alteryx currently doesn't.

 

The format of an email address with Display Name is something like "Smith, John" <john.smith@example.com> (with or without the quotes).

There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least). This would be an enhancement to the email tool to allow for checking a box to say "Save in Draft" and if that box was checked the send email functionality would not be called but the email would be created. 

Report text tools currently only give the option to allign left, right or center. Would be great if we could have the option to have a true 'Justify' option also as it makes chunks of text look so much cleaner

Hello there!

Currently the email tool has the following configuration:

It is a fairly easy tool to use - however one part that I would like to be improved is testing the SMTP settings - similar to how it is done on the Alteryx Server. It would be awesome to have a button as part of this page, that would send a test email, and return true/display to the user that the email sent correctly. This would stop the need to setup dummy data and a dummy output to test a connection before rolling the email tool out into a live environment/use-case.

 

I imagine something along these lines for this functionality:

Clicking test (and passing):

Clicking test (and failing):

Thanks,
TheOC

 

This year, Microsoft updated improve their API (GraphAPI) to access Office365 enviroment.

 

Alteryx have launched on Microsoft District in Public Gallery the Dataverse , Onedrive & Sharepoint Connectors.

 

Alteryx must develop as soon as possible an connector/email with same authenticator options as connectors Above and improve the emails settings.

 

 

It´s important to release and documentation to show wich permissions on Azure it's necssary to send the emails. 

 

References:

 

Microsoft Announce:

https://docs.microsoft.com/pt-br/lifecycle/announcements/exchange-online-basic-auth-deprecated 

 

Azure Permissions:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/user-sendmail?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=csharp 

Please consider adding a new setting to the Render Tool, so the users can select or deselect if an existing File should be overwritten (Otherwise throw an error, like the Output Data Tool does, when configured to create a new Sheet and that Sheet already exists)

 

 

 

Hi,

I'm not finding it anywhere as a current option, but my company uses branded PowerPoint slides using our logo, these slides are in 16.:9 (widescreen) for slide size, but Alteryx won't output to that size even if I choose custom for page size & have Widescreen selected as an option. Could there be an Advanced Options button added that would allow users more output choices, like choosing the 16:9 ratio size output? Without it, I'm having to output the largest map I can create (13 x 9.75 in Report Map tool) and then stretch/shrink to get it to fit the 16:9 slide...for every single map/slide (currently making 40 maps at once).

 

Is there a work around to accomplish my goal currently? And if not, could the option be added to the Render tool? Thank you!

when you render out to an excel file, the excel file is created as a new file.  You cannot render to an existing excel file.

I'd like to see this functionality.  I have a client who has a workbook with multiple formatted sheets and they'd like to render an addiitional sheet of formatted data out from Alteryx into the existing workbook.

There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least).

I'm in the banking sector and I have been seeing many banks using Alteryx and Alteryx server in their routines. Also, when it comes to sending automatic e-mails in this sector, its very risky. We need a "four eyes check" when dealing with clients information. Currently there is no workaround that could be applied to e-mail tool when used in Alteryx server as well.

My idea is to simply create a button "Save in draft" in e-mail tool to create an .eml format as output. This .eml can be read by outlook and thus, it creates a draft.

This also should be taken into account when dealing with drafts in alteryx server, so that any user can run the workflow and get the desired draft.

Thanks

Hi Community Microsoft wil deprecate basic Authentication, so users will need OAuth2 to be included in the email tool. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic... Microsoft is removing the ability to use Basic authentication in Exchange Online for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP, Remote PowerShell, Exchange Web Services (EWS), Offline Address Book (OAB), Outlook for Windows, and Mac. This change will be efective on October 1, 2022. Best regards, JP

Alteryx has the ability to connect to data sources using fat clients and ODBC but not JDBC.  If the ability to use JDBC could be added to the product it could remove the need to install fat clients.

The only thing I have ever found that Excel can do that Alteryx can't is creating a pivot table that allows the user to drill up and down levels of aggregation by collapsing or expanding levels in the data hierarchy. (like this). 

 

Can you add an interactive table to the new interactive charting tool that can provide this level of functionality? It's embarrassing to have to tell Excel users they can't do this in Alteyrx, and likely leads many of them to stick to Excel--and miss out on all the other great things Alteryx can do.

 

Thank you! 

I am having to render my Alteryx formatted reports to Excel and then upload the report to Google Sheets

 

It would be very useful (and improve the less well known Alteryx Reporting capabilities) to be able to render straight to a Google Sheet and preserve the formatting.

 

 

 

Thanks

I am currently using alteryx to generate pdf reports and noticed there is no option to have multiple row headers. In my line of work i cant skip this as the end users insist on having it like they have always had it.

I definitely think this should be available as many of us like replicate canned reports which are otherwise in excel and hence see the need for such an option.

 

The following might give an example of the multi row header,

 

 

Also the ability to merge certain columns to create the above effect should be available.