Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I have been going back and forth between output tool and render tool. The render tool works well when you want formatting. It's also great when you don't want an output created (when rec count=0) while output tool always generates a file regardless if there are records present or not. Output tool works well when you have a lot of fields but then you cannot easily control styling.

My issue is that I have a render tool connected to table tool. In the table tool everything looks neat; there's no wrapped text and no unnecessary white space (auto column width not necessary). However, with the render output, you don't know what to expect. Especially, when you have a lot of fields (30+) data gets truncated and column width is forcibly narrowed due to paper dimensions used in render tool. I skip letter and tabloid formats and now I have to mess with custom paper width (e.g.50) to get my reports looking right and when you have dynamic fields, this is not ideal. 

Would it be possible to make the paper size/width automatic in the render tool just like in the table and layout tool? Then this tool also doesn't negate what layout/table tools do so well.

 

 

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

 

I have several regular outputs I use that are in both Excel and PDF (depending on who I am sending them to).

The format of these is always:

For Excel, create a summary sheet and set as the first tab, then create detailed sheets as additional tabs in the same .xlsx file.
The summary sheet always has the same fields, but the fields may reference different detail tabs day to day.

After the output, I can manually open Excel and change the field to a formula that references the other tabs (hyperlink function).
It would be great if I could just type the hyperlink formula in Alteryx and have that embedded into the Excel output.

The same goes for PDFs, except I would reference other pages (or if using PDF portfolio I would reference other PDFs in the same portfolio).

We've been looking into the phoneHome information that collects usage of Designer in the enterprise, and it looks like this data set (in the UsageReports collection, I believe).

Please can you add the CanvasFilename that was run to this data - we need to be able to surveil the use of Alteryx in our enterprise which is not being done within the server environment, and without the canvas name this becomes tremendously difficult.

 

Reference:

 

https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Configuration/SaveDesignerUsageData.htm%3FTocPa...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Analytics-Blog/Alteryx-Analytics-11-0-Monitoring-and-Reporting-on-A...

 

cc: @BenG @avinashbonu @Deeksha @BenBu @revathi

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

I believe that in addition to the already suggested idea of having an option to avoid sending one email per record, the attachments capability should be overhauled. Sending multiple attachments in a single email is a common need, but the only Community idea is a partial address of the issue by requesting an ability to use semi-colon separated paths in a single field as the attachment criterion. This doesn't seem to be an optimal method given the potential usefulness of the tool and ease of use considerations. 

 

I think that a full solution should include:

• The capability to select a (file paths) field of all desired attachments which can then be uploaded into a single email
• The ability to use wildcards or directories in the file input mode (as you find in the Input Tool) in order to upload multiple attachments to a single email)

This would be a transformative solution to a common email need, and I think greatly appreciated!

Sometimes I get conversion error messages or warnings that really don't matter, and it would be great if there was a function similar to spell check or grammer check where I could say "Don't show me this again", so that once I've read the message I can choose whether or that particular message pops up again.

In user settings you can define a "Logging Directory" and if you do the system will send the Output Log (Results view messages) to a file in that folder.  The name generated is Alteryx_Log_ + an apparent sequential number, example: Alteryx_Log_1519833221_1.

This makes it impossible to identify which flow it is associated with and which instance of execution simply by looking at the name, you have to parse the content to see the flow name and start/end timestamps.  For trouble shooting we want to be able to look at the list of file names and quickly see which file, of possibly hundreds of files, we need to look at to see what went wrong.

 

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)

 

 

 

I would like to see either the option to create a Venn Diaram within the current chart tool or an entirely new tool specifically for Venn Diagrams.

 

I often work with data from multiple sources and would like to better understand how much of my data is in multiple sources and how much is only from a single source. A great way to view this is with a Venn Diagram.

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

 

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

 

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

 

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

 

 

 

 

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

Using other data viz tools like Tableau, we often plot yearly timeseries of data onto the same line chart so we can quickly compare year-on-year differences.  All data viz tools seem to have complexities but the logical approach is the same.  What you do is map all the years data to a relative year, i.e. this year, and then give each year it's own title.  See the example below snipped from a Tableau dashboard:

 

 

In this example 7 years of data have been plotted on the same chart.  Note the x-axis,  In Tableau we are able to format the X-Axis labels to only show month and day (Mon-D).  This removes the common relative year, i.e 2019.

 

As expected, Alteryx is awesome at preparing data to do this kind of thing.  Using the interactive charting tool you can build really nice charts.  However there is currently no way to format the X-Axis label, you must show the relative year too, as shown in the picture below (snipped from the browse tool, outputted from the interactive chart tool):

 

 

 

 

It was really easy to prepare the 5 year min, max and average lines, which is almost impossible to do in Tableau!

 

My idea in a nutshell is, please change the interactive chart tool so that the labels on the axis can be formatted to the user's choice, i.e. in this case formatted from datetime to "%B-%d".

 

Please note, the workflow i'm building in this case, is creating 3 line charts of related data, each by year.  The end product is a daily email sent to users.

 

Thanks, nick 

It would be great if the mapping allowed point themes to be bi-variate, i.e. you could change the size of a point at the same time as adjusting its colour to show two variables on the map at once, relative to each other.

Chris

It would be good to be able to fix pie chart colours (either automatically of manually), so that when building a report, categories are given the same colour throughout the report across multiple pie charts.  Currently, if the number of categories being shown varies, there is no way to manually align the colours (In the Bar Chart type there is a Style Mode for the Series where you can use a formula to assign a colour based on a criteria such as the name, but not for pie charts).

 

First of, let me say that I really love that the render tool adds commas to your numbers when you output them to excel. You can even control the number of decimals!

 

However, there are those times that I wish I could turn the commas off. For example, I have a column that represents years. In this case, I want it to be a number, but I don't want commas. I can see this xml coming out of my table tool:

 

.de41ddeb2857c4579b858debce63bfbec tbody .column0 { numeric:true; decimal-places:0; } 

 

I would love an additional item like: separator:false that could be set in the table tool to shut off the separator. I've mocked up the table tool here:

In my limited knowledge, I'm guessing Alteryx would need to change/enhance the way their pcxml is structured.

 

I understand that Server and Designer + Scheduler versions have the option to "cancel workflows running longer than X”.

 

I'd like to see that functionality in the desktop edition as well.

Hello Community & Devs!

 

This idea consists of a couple of requests that are related to the same topic - table styling using the formula field.  As most probably know, the table tool offers column/row specific formatting.  Some of the basic formatting offered in the configuration are: fonts, texts colors, and backgrounds.  For anything that doesn't fall into these types of formatting rules, there is a "Formula" option that allows the user to define CSS-like statements to format the selected column, row, or cell.  Related to this formula, I have two requests:

 

1. I would like a double border to be included as an option.  After speaking with a support engineer, they do not believe this is currently available.  The double border is used in most financial documents as the "sum line".  I see a lot of uses for this, especially in my industry.  I would expect a formula like this: "border-top: 1px solid double black;" to give a result like this:Desired OutputBut it gives a result like this:Current Alteryx Output
2. I would like to see additional documentation on this Style Formula field so users have a reference when attempting to do advanced styling on a table.  I don't think it's sufficient to say, "Use of this requires a solid understanding of CSS styles" if all CSS styling options aren't available.  Documentation would at least let us know that what we are attempting to do isn't possible.

 

Thanks for considering my ideas!

 

-Nick

 

 

With the new intelligence suite there is a much higher use of blob files and we would like to be able to input them as a regular input instead of having to use non- standard tools like Image, report text or a combination of directory/blob or input/download to pull in images, etc. I would like to see the standard input tool capable of bringing in blob files as well.

Blob InputImage InputText Input