Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Reduce mouse movement required by bringing up the "Add" menu at the point of the cursor when right-clicking on a field in the Fields window.

It would be great if Alteryx developed an option to keep data transformations and additions already ran through the module. After adding new tools to the module, then the module would keep all of the data already transformed or added up to that point and would only spend time running the data through any new tools added after that point.

It would save the analyst a lot of time when developing big and complex modules.

Is it possible to add a search feature to the Summarize Tool that is similar to the search feature in the Select Tool?  Selecting specific fields to summarize in small datasets is fine, but if I am dealing with a table that has 200 fields searching for a specific field can be cumbersome.  Type in a few key letters to filter the available fields would be helpful.

When using the transpose and cross tab tools, I find that I frequently need to reorder the columns selected in the "Key Columns" and "Group data by these values" sections of the tools respectively by using a select tool. It would be helpful to provide users with the ability reorder fields displayed in these tools similar to the functionality provided in the select, join, append, summarize tools etc. Currently the tools default to outputting these columns in the order they come in through the incoming data stream. 

 

 

 

Currently both the formula and summarise tools round to 6.d.p for finance calculations such as IRR. People coming from Excel will be used to a higher precision then this. It would be great to up the precision in line with other platforms to 8.d.p +

 

Hello,

 

Today I worked with summarize tool and need to merge/concatenate 10 string columns of dataset with different separator than is set up by default (",")

Current status is that you can multiple select columns that you want to concatenate (that's good) but when you want to set up for all output columns different separator than default, you must set up it for each column, in my case it was 10 columns..

 

one field is selected (Concatenate option is available)

 

 

More fields selected (Concatenate option is hidden)

 

 

My idea

Allow to multiple selection of fields that are concatenated and allow to set up separator for these fields. Benefit will be that you can mass setup different separator for various fields

Improve Help Documentation or in-tool options for handling null values in statistical tools like Weighted Average or Linear Regression. For instance, checkbox to remove null value records, or at least warn users.

 

In the processing of learning to perform linear regression in RStudio and Alteryx, I came across differing outputs depending on how null values were addressed. Take the Weighted Average tool for example.

 

In R, the weighted.mean function treats null values in the variable of interest as if they were not there. If the user does not specify that null values exist, the result is NA. If any null values exist in the weight field, the result is NA.

 

Since I am more familiar with Alteryx, I originally did the data preparation—including calculating the weighted means—in Alteryx. When comparing these weighted means with those generated in R, I found that Alteryx treats the null values as zeros (i.e. includes them in the calculation). The user would have to know this is incorrect and first filter out the null values. See screenshot examples.

 

 

 

This is also the case within the Linear Regression tool. If null values are not omitted prior to regression, the results are wildly different. Perhaps this is known by more experienced users/statisticians, but this incorrect usage would have gone on unbeknownst to be had I not cross-checked with RStudio.

 

Weighted Average in AlteryxWeighted Mean in R

As in title - it might be helpful to define custom name when you are using Transpose tool instead default nomenclature "Name" and "Value".

I test the  10% percentile for {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}, whch alteryx gives 1.8, while it should be 1.
According the help, it should return the value of the target row, which shall not result any decimal in this case.

It would be great if Alteryx could introduce a tool implementing a Decision Model Notation (DMN)-style Decision Table as an option to remove business logic from a workflow.

 

Arbitrary business rules are frequently implemented against datasets in Alteryx workflows before actual processing occurs. The implementation of complex business logic frequently results in a spider web of join, filter, formula, and union tools. 

Ever since Alteryx 11 came out, the way dates and DateTimes are handled and computed changed from v10.  Formulas that I had working before no longer work.  The single biggest culprit I tend to see for this problem is that Alteryx 11 no longer seems to be able to intelligently compare Date and DateTime formats.  This is kind of annoying because it forces me to run a DateTime function on all my Date fields for doing comparisons.

For example, I have a formula that I use to calculate if a date is the beginning of the month.  That formula is:

 

IF DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date],"month") = [Snapshot Date]
THEN 1
ELSE 0
ENDIF

Where in the above, Snapshot Date is a date field with data incoming in a format like "2017-01-01".

 

In Alteryx 10, this formula returned as expected, true.  However, in Alteryx 11, it returns false.  When I dove into this a bit more, I noted that DateTimeTrim will always return a DateTime format, so the formula is attempting to compare "2017-01-01 00:00:00" to "2017-01-01".  For some reason, Alteryx now doesn't think this comparison will result to true.

 

To address this, I now have to do:

IF DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date],"month") = DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date], "day")
THEN 1
ELSE 0
ENDIF

My suggestion: Let comparisons between Date and DateTime formats work with the assumption that any Date field is as of midnight that day.  In the example above, Alteryx would implicitly assume that "2017-01-01" is "2017-01-01 00:00:00" for any comparisons to DateTime, like it did in the past.

As my Alteryx workflows are becoming more complex and involve integrating and conforming more and more data sources it is becoming increasingly important to be able to communicate what the output fields mean and how they were created (ie transformation rules) as output for end user consumption; particular the file target state output. 

 

It would be great if Alteryx could do the following: 

1. Produce a simple data dictionary from the Select tool and the Output tool. The Select tool more or less contains everything that is important to the business user; It would be awesome to know of way to export this along with the actual data produced by the output tool (hopefully this is something I've overlooked and is already offered).

Examples:

• using Excel would be to produce the output data set in one sheet and the data dictionary for all of its attributes in the second sheet.
• For an odbc output you could load the data set to the database and have the option to either create a data dictionary as a database table or csv file (you'd also want to offer the ability to append that data to the existing dictionary file or table. 

 

2. This one is more complex; but would be awesome. If the workflow used could be exported into a spreadsheet Source to Target (S2T) format along with supporting metadata / data dictionary for every step of the ETL process. This is necessary when I need to communicate my ETL processes to someone that cannot afford to purchase an alteryx licence but are required to review and approved the ETL process that I have built. I'd be happy to provide examples of how someone would likely want to see that formatted. 

I usually have some checks of my workflows. The simplest are row counts at varying points. I use Count Records tools, rename the outputs using a Select tool, Union them, and use a Message tool to calculate and show Deltas. I want to have the ability to control the output field name of the Count Records tool the same way I can control the output field name of a Record ID tool.

Disabled Containers throw errors if it contains any interface tools. It should not throw any error as the user is intentionally disabling the container.  

 

Hi,

 

Recently I was helping a client to design the workflow to do transformation. In the middle of the work, I feel a bit lost on handling so many fields and thinking it would be great if there is a feature that allow me to track the field actions along the workflow. It could be something like a configuration on the canvas, user activate it only when they want to.

And when it is activated, the workflow could become:

So it is easier to find the path of certain field along the whole workflow.

 

Or is there any method to achieve this at the moment?

 

Thanks.

 

Kenneth

Hi,

This feature isn't a must - but would definitely be a nice to have.

Similar to the excel having a tab with key figures like average, count and sum 

It would be a really good idea to do something similar within Alteryx just to have a quick glance on key figures/functions (example attached - apologise for the bad paint job but definitely would look good with Alteryx colour scheme)


Thanks

Can you add some additional options to the running sum tool?  I know this can be done in the Multi-Row formula, but it just takes too long to program and Alteryx is designed for speed and I know it can be done.  Can you add options to average, standard deviation, etc. also with running sum?  And then add a rolling time window on it.  That would be great!

Thanks.

Looking for a tool to replicate the Goal seek functionality built into Excel.

Seems it could be solved by using R or iterative macros however a tool would make life much easier,

When CrossTab is used, string data in fields is converted to field names.  If the data in the data field has a hyphen in it, this is automatically converted to an underscore when it becomes a field name. 

 

Hyphens are legal in field names, so can we make CrossTab tolerate the string as is without changing it?  If that is a breaking change, could a checkbox be added that allows users to get CrossTab to try to use the text as is and exception if the string is illegal as a field name?

 

Hyphens are required in the field name when using the Download tool, as some header names like "Content-Type" have hyphens in them.