Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx is extremely user friendly. It is simple to use, self explanatory, and manages to ride the difficult line in balancing pre-defined "canned" tools, yet allow enough user-customization to embrace advanced users' specific requirements. One area in which Alteryx could further improve upon though is additional options/inputs for users to change default tool and canvas settings, as well as improved overall formatting shortcuts.

One of the differences between a truly autonomous, ever-green, or "corporate" solution and a "user-specific workflow" are tool annotations, tool names, and the overall presentation of a workflow. Without annotations and/or a tool naming convention, any given workflow still requires significant time for any user to sit down and truly understand any given workflow. However, with the settings as-is, this can be extremely time consuming, tedious, and monotonous at times. This can be reconciled with some sort of inclusion of default settings that intelligently can use some sort of user-input settings to better annotate tool names beyond the current default, as well as tool names. Specifically - the default annotation settings are good in thought/design, but poor in practice. They clutter workflows, are truncated past the very first few lines, and are usually always changed in final workflow drafts. One solution would be to allow users to set default annotations for specific tools (i.e., "Calculated Fields" for formula bars, and/or no annotations ever even), and utilize the current default annotation settings used now and applied to a hint display box that appears when hovering over any given tool. A different solution may be as simple as taking only new calculated field names as the annotation, rather than each field and its formula. In that instance, I have yet to see any final workflows in which the default annotations for every tool are kept. An even better solution would be to have some sort of canvas view that allows users to make mass, stream-lined changes to tool and canvas formatting - i.e., select all formula tools, and apply a single user-input formatting schema. Select multiple tool boxes and adjust their visual appearance, etc. Other default settings that would be nice to adjust are toolbox and comment settings, as well as saving custom templates for toolboxes/comment boxes. This would just eliminate all the time in which we create similar templates over and over between workflows. This would de-clutter workflows, save needless time always removing/adjusting default annotations, and allow yet another "quirk" that separates Alteryx above the rest.

Again, these are just a few suggestions in which I feel Alteryx can continue to set the bar, and the standard for the rest of the industry. Thank you!

R has a very large number of useful packages and examples.  Often, we only need a few lines of R code.  However, integrating that with the data flow in Alteryx can be complex.  It would be ideal if there was a tool where you could drop in R code, and have the tool create named inputs and outputs for each variable in the R code, and create blank text documents or YXDBs with the correct column names and variable types.  This seems like it could be automated, and would eliminate a lot of trial and error in using small pieces of R code for specialty tasks.

Hi,

It would be very useful if I could delete/remove fields while using the tool Join - manual configure fields directly instead of adding a "Select" tool next.

Hi,

It would be very useful for me If I could consolidate in the same output two different inputs: 1- the whole output flow; 2- The summarize from the output. That would save some time from doing pivot table analysis for instance. 

Thanks

Alteryx could have a way to, in select tool, choose the type of string field as numeric changing between comma or dot the separators without the needing of formula tool for that.

It would be extremely useful to be able to modify a tool parameter with a single row output from another tool within the same workflow.  My current solution is to use either the Append Fields tool or embed the other tool into a batch macro with a single row as the input.  This would greatly simplify workflows and allow for a much more robust "programmatic" approach to workflow development.

Hello all,

Would love to see an analysis too or a major upgrade to the browse tool.

9 times out of 10, if i want to understand the data that is in my browse tool, i have to export it into excel just to filter and sort. This functionality is very much so needed in alteryx in either a new Analysis tool or (more ideally) into the browse tool.

What are yall's thoughts?

Nick

When building an analytic app which uses a Map Input, please enable Interface tool functionality which would allow the app user to change the base map (roads, imagery, etc.) within the app map interface.  Currently I believe the only way to accommodate different base maps in an app is to configure multiple Map Inputs – one for each base map.  The resulting map interface duplication clutters up the app and opens the door for configuration errors.

Enable app user control of base map

As we all know, we can filter only based on 1 condition on 1 column within our data-set using FILTER tool till date.

Idea is if people can add multiple conditions on same or different columns within same tool. e.g.

1. Multiple conditions might be on same column (like column A > 1 and A is not null)
2. Different conditions on different columns of dataset (like column A>=5 and B equals ="xyz"

Thanks!

When i have a lot of columns in a database and I don't know the specific name of a column, it gets difficult to find it inside the select and summarize tool, for example. If you include a browser inside the most used tools, it would be easier to identify the columns and reduce time. Thanks for your time.

I like the concept of the Interactive charts tool but it seems overtly cumbersome to use when you are trying to perform simple changes to a line graph.  The chart tool was much easier.  I like the direction the interactive tool is going but I should not have to edit the tools xml to display point values on a line graph.

In this blog post http://www.chaosreignswithin.com/2019/06/alteryx19-nashville-we-turned-it-up-to.html, Mark mentioned there is report of Runner macros not working correctly on Windows 10 Enterprise. So I decided to create test workflows to reproduce this error. I've attached 4 files, which you'll need to download and place in a folder to reproduce this error.

Here is the error I produced. The ListRunnerDriver.yxmd goes into an infinite loop.

Here is the state of the folder is when I aborted the ListRunnerDriver.yxmd.

I wasn’t able to reproduce this error with 1 child workflow, which isn’t how we use List Runner macro. So if you did your testing with 1 child workflow, you would not have seen an error.

After I added a 2nd child workflow is when the error occurred, which is how we typically use List Runner macro, more than 1 child workflows.

NB: I used only List Runner and Log Parser macros from the Crew Macros Pack. 

Steps to reproduce the errors:

1. Create a folder

2. Copy all attached files in say folder.

3. Open ListRunnerDriver.yxmd

4. Run ListRunnerDriver.yxmd.

5. Look for errors.

ListRunnerChild.yxmd and ListRunnerChild2.yxmd each are a simple workflow with 2 tools: Text Input and Output tools. They write to 2 different Excel workbooks. In this case, only the ListRunnerChild.yxmd produced an output.

When List Runner macro tried to run ListRunnerChild2.yxmd is when the infinite loop started.

The ListRunnerDriver.Log.xlsx has the messages, but in this case, with the infinite loop and errors, this output is never written.

Sometimes, when I am working with new data sources, it would be nice to have a dockable pane that would allow me to view the schema of all of my connected data sources. That way I could rename fields and change data types as needed without having to jump from one select tool to the other to see how the schemas compare.

When you get an error message in an R tool it's almost impossible for a newbie to figure out what has just happened...

For eg. the normal R package randomForest sets 32 as a max number of classes for a given class variable

Thus when you happen to run randomForest on anything with > 32 classes you get an error, imposssible to figure out without searching on the net or better surfing on the community.

How about a basic rules checker providing message on the configs sayin;

"X" and "Y" variables are categoric and have more than 32 classes,

you have to fix thembefore running an RF tool in order to succeed"

Hi,

As per our project, we need to publish the image into a PDF file which will be downloaded from web URL. when we download the image from web URL that will be saved as TIF format in our local machine. This TIF format is not being supported by Alteryx.

The tool needs an enhancement (to support TIFF) which can be used for converting tiff format to other  format OR directly tiff image should be usable in the report.

Thanks,

Raju Miyapuram

In previous version of Alteryx, when the user selected records in the Browse tool, a count for those records would show next to the display that shows the total record count. When you separated the windows (Browse map is in one window, Browse data in another) that feature went away on the data side (it still shows in the map view side). The only way to know how many records the user selected to is launch a whole other window showing just the selected records. Could you please bring back the selected records display, like in the attached image?

I´ve looked in the forums, and the idea is new, although it has similarities to others. Since Alteryx already supports Crtl+c and Crtl+v - why not support "F4" as well. In ALL MS-Office programs it repeats the last step and thus eases the burden on mouse and user...

I realize that repeating a whole process might (!) not be feasible - but single steps (e.g. "Formatting to the similar size like the last item....") would already be very helpful.

Since Tableau does not offer this - and it has a lot more to format and repeat - Alteryx could gain in UI-friendliness...

Occasionally, the Calgary Loader tool will not write out all fields passed to it.  This seems to happen after writing out a certain number of fields then later, when rerunning, adding a new output field.  Very annoying because you don't know it will happen until processing is complete and you examine the result.  I usually manually delete the calgary files prior to rerunning, to avoid the versioning, but it still happens.

Also, please make the versioning optional with a check box, default off.

I have a process that sends out about 1,500 emails. Every once in a while, it will get stuck at some Percentage and I will have to eventually cancel the workflow, figure out how many emails were sent, and then skip that many emails in order to avoid sending duplicate emails. The process of figuring out how many were sent is currently taking the % of the tool at cancellation minus 50%(since that is where it starts), Multiplying it by 2, and then multiplying that % by the number of lines to get the approximate line of data where it froze up, and then reaching out to individuals to see if they received the email to narrow down exactly where the error occurred. 

Example: 60% - 50%= 10% * 2 = 20% * 1249 = 249.8.

This has been pretty accurate in the past, but obviously is not ideal. Is there no way for it to show us how many were sent even if we cancelled the workflow mid processing of the tool?