Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In trying to work with varying content and rules for extracting information, the regex tool requires a literal string.

The functions can accept a workflow parameter but I needed to parse out the results.

For now, I have only a few patterns but looking to handle a more general case.  Thanks

It would be nice to have the expression box (found in formula tools etc.) and the join selection (found on joins etc.) as interface tools.

Could the workflow name be retained when browsing for a YXZP save location instead of blanking it out as soon as you change folders?

Give the option in the tags properties to place the tag to the right of the tool. 

Have this be the default setting for Browse and Output tools or others that would normally be found at the end of a workflow. This allows the detail to remain and a cleaner view of the module.

When you have multiple workflows open in tabs and want to rearrange them, it's kind of hard to tell where the tab is. In Firefox and Chrome, as examples, the tabs move around as you drag - if you drag a tab left, the tab next to it will slide to the right. In Tableau, a line with an arrow appears in the location where the tab will be dropped. But in the Alteryx interface, the new location of the tab is not so obvious. A line or something at the destination point would be great!

I often find when building a big workflow that I need to cancel its running in order to tweak something, but I still want to know which element was making it slow/crashing the workflow.

What would be useful in this circumstance is for the performance profiling to work even on partially finished (e.g. cancelled) workflows. It could just display a message reminding that this is a percentage of things that have run so far.

This is an interface issue but I wish Alteryx can allow user to scroll across the ribbon toolbar (e.g. In/Out, Prep, Join, Spatial tools...) when the toolbar is active.

That is, for example, when I click on "Transform" and notice my tool is not there, I can quickly scroll my mouse to move to other toolsets. Microsoft Office is a best practice for this and I think this will make it much efficient to locate tools.

Example:

If I want to create the 'Clean Equipment ID" I would have to use a complicated RegEx expression. Wouldnt it be easier for the end-user to have a function to do so? Like Exclude(string,character)?

In this case it could be: exclude([equipment id],"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ") and if I wanted just letters it could be exclude([equipment id],"0123456789").

For most of our "Production" mode, we launch our apps with an xml file containing the parameter send to the app.

We would like to have the path of this file in the Engine Constant.

When working on the Weekly Challenge #108, I was trying to design a non-macro solution.

I ended up settling on the Generate Rows tool and was trying to find a way to generate rows until I had reached or exceeded the maximum density, however, I ran into an issue where I'd always have one too few rows, since the final row I was looking for was the one that broke the condition I specified.

In order to get around this, I came up with the following solution:

Spoiler

 

Essentially, I just set my condition to twice that of the true threshold I was looking for. This worked because I was always doubling the current value in my Loop Expression, and so anything which broke the 'actual' condition I was looking for ([MaxDensity]), would necessarily also break the second condition if doubled again.

However, for many other loop expressions, this sort of solution would not work.

My idea is to include a checkbox which, when selected, would also generate the final row which broke the specified condition.

By adding such a checkbox, it would allow users to continue using the Generate Rows tool as they already do, but reduce the amount of condition engineering that users are required to do in order to get that one extra row they're looking for, and reduce the number of  potentially unseen errors in their workflows.

Hello, I am very new to Alteryx, so my suggestion might appear elementary for the veteran-users. From the standpoint of adoptation by less technical people (moving from Excel to Alteryx), would it be possible to take common scenarios of Fuzzy Matching and automate them?

For example, if you have 2 databases and you want to match and clean them up, you have to have close to 10 steps, with sorting, adding unique identifiers, joining, fuzzy matching, etc. Just look at your video named "Fuzzy Matching" or other videos for Tableau+Alteryx. They idea is basic. If you know most common use cases and you have already developed a methodology for how to solve these cases, why not have them as part of the tools library?

Also, when matching, for example universities, wouldn't it be easier if all those common, aka appearing many times, words were automatically suggested to be removed from the "match". Example: University A and Univeristy B are two different Universities, but they share the common word "University". While it's important that this word is there, it is not the reason to pair these two together. Maually going through and identifying and typing these common words is an extra step. It would be much easier to have a pop list of these common words and the count of records in which they appear, sorted by the count, and a check box to include or exclude the words.

Thank you,

Olga

Link to the Fuzzy Matching video. Check Minute 9:41.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZiM2YSCCY&index=13&list=PLfSLx4WE4q52YoGEzJEBalfNou6jfRTF0&nohtml5...

Hi,

I am sure that I can't be the only person that would be interested in an output tool that allows categorical fields on both axes.  THis would allow you to visualise the following example and I would suggest that this was either similar to the heatmap with boxes or the colour / size of the entry was determined by a third numerical value - such as 'Confidence' from the table below.  THere might be ways to extend the idea as well as having a fourth parameter that puts text in the box or another number but it would be useful and not too hard I am sure.

Many thanks in advance for considering this,

Peter

It may just be me, but after I upgraded to 2018.2, the Table/Query edit window doesn't take up the full window when I maximize the parent window. 

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, maybe it's just me.  See attached.

Hi everybody! As you can read here I had the necessity to insert a macro (publish to tableau server) at the end of a self-made app.

I have actually found 2 different ways to solve the problem:

1) Turn the macro into an app and use 2 chained apps.

2) Copy and paste tools (normal and interface) from the macro to my app.

Both solution work, but both require some (quite a lot to be honest) editing and re-work that actually is already done. It's kind of like to re-invent the wheel!

A quick way to merge 2 configuration interfaces would be really usefull.

I am parsing retailer promotions and have two input strings:

1. take a further 10%
2. take an additional 10%

I am using the regex parse tool to parse out the discount value, using the following regex:

further|additional (\d+)%

When the input contains examples of both options (i.e 'further' and 'additional'), the tool only seems to parse the first one encountered.

E.g if I state the regex string as:

further|additional (\d+)%

It only parses line 1 above

And if I state the regex string as:

additional|further (\d+)%

It only parse line 2

Create a standardized Mailbox application that could bolt onto Alteryx Server, to handle incoming attachments from sources like a Service Desk (Service Now for example) and other applications.

Essentially anything that regularly exports data in the form of an emailed attachments to which Alteryx could, using a series of predefined user rules and a designated email address, put those attachments into various directories ready for processing by automated Alteryx workflows.

This would save a huge amount of time as people currently have to manually drag and drop files. At least the on board Alteryx designers here haven't been able to come with a solution. Would also save any messy programming around systems like Outlook and bending any security issues within those systems. Many, many other applications have this simple feature built in to their products, especially service desks. I believe there would be a huge benefit to this very simple bolt on.

Hey guys!!

I was just thinking... they might not need to fully build out a python ide, but could still reach the same objective.

You should be able to keep a python file on its own and call it in r.  By doing this, you might be able to have the json/xml handling of python with the visual/stats power of R while it being nicely bundled in your workflow.  This uses base functions in r and does a good job turning a pandas dataset to an r dataframe you can move along your workflow.

You could always just use this same idea to write a file somewhere and once it's written, your workflow will continue.  If you do, the code is literally 1 line in r...  Anyway, let me know your thoughts! 🙂

Will this work for your organization?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-python-r-windows-7-subhash-jaini?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publ...

There is a great functionality in Excel that lets users "seek" a value that makes whatever chain of formulas you might have work out to a given value. Here's what Microsoft explains about goal seek: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-Goal-Seek-to-find-a-result-by-adjusting-an-input-value-...

My specific example was this:

In the excel (attached), all you have to do is click on the highlighted blue cell, select the “data” tab up top and then “What-if analysis” and finally “goal seek.” Then you set the dialogue box up to look like this:

 Set cell: G9

To Value: 330

By changing cell" J6

And hit “Okay.” Excel then iteratively finds the value for the cell J6 that makes the cell G9 equal 330. Can I build a module that will do the same thing? I’m figuring I wouldn’t have to do it iteratively, if I could build the right series of formulas/commands. You can see what I’m trying to accomplish in the formulas I’ve built in Excel, but essentially I’m trying to build a model that will tell me what the % Adjustment rate should be for the other groups when I’ve picked the first adjustment rate, and the others need to change proportionally to their contribution to the remaining volume.

There doesn't really seem to be a way to do this in Alteryx that I can see. I hate to think there is something that excel can do that Alteryx can't!

Why do we need yxmd files? Why shouldn't the default be yxmz? The workflow logic is the same. If you don't add any interface tools it will run, and it you want to have a interface you can. 

If you start off with an yxmd and then decide to make it an app you now have two files to worry about.  

As a habit I no longer save things as yxmd. As soon as I start a new workflow I save it as an yxmz.

Thoughts?