Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Whenever I start something in Alteryx Designer which takes some time (e.g. opening a workflow), and I want to do something in another application in the meantime (e.g., Explorer), Alteryx Designer repeatedly catches the Windows focus back and brings Alteryx Designer to the front, interrupting my work in the other application. And Alteryx does this really multiple time during an action (often multi times per second), not even only when finished, causing me to  have to press Alt-Tab multiple times to get the other window in the front again).

First, this is annoying: If I purposely select a different tool to be in the front I want to work in that tool and not be disturbed by a different tool that catches the focus back.

Second: This cannot be good for performance. Sending the "I want the focus" signals to Windows also takes time.

Suggestion:

Switch off all requests for getting the focus in entire Alteryx Designer. Instead, the Alteryx entry in the task bar might blink once or twice in green when the background action is completed.

If there are people who like this catching focus thing, then please introduce a setting so that it's possible to switch it off.

When using "Find and Replace", the content of the search term field ("Find") is cleared when switching between workflow windows. From my perspective, there's no reason for that. Why does Alteryx Designer decide that I don't want to search for the same term in another workflow?

Please change that behaviour that content in "Find", "Search Locations", and "Replace:" are preserved when switching between Designer windows.

Cache function is very useful when executing very long db request.

I'd like to see a checkbox option (in workflow runtime settings for example) to enable/disable automatic caching of first execution for all inputs tools.

I have a sales column in my dataset that includes both a dollar sign and a period (e.g., '$320,000.00'). When I use the data cleaning tool and select 'Remove unwanted characters' with the punctuation checkbox, it removes both the dollar sign and the period. However, I only want to remove the dollar sign. It would be great if @Alteryx could allow users to specify which character they want to remove after selecting the punctuation checkbox. Thanks!

Hello team,

It would be really nice if user interface tool can be set with a default set up that will flow into the connected tool. Currently it will always been blank as no data flow in.

There are ways to bypass it as run the automation in Open Debug, but then if you want to amend the the automation you need to go back to the original WF and then run it again with Open Debug.

Of course you can set a static data for these fields however then you must remove them before saving it to the Gallery, which might create future errors if you are forgetting to delete the static data.

So if I added a Select Date, it will be nice if it will be possible to select a data in that tool and that date will reflected in the WF. It is less an issue at the development part as normally at that stage these tools will not be set up, however when you need to upgrade existing WF or amend one due to changes, that's were it will be very handy and will save a lot of time.

Improve the user experience by enable search filtering options in browse tool result just as in the canvas. See attached pics.

I used to use a software before (LabVIEW) and it had the capability to exchange code via snippets or as part of png images. I think this will impact not only community, but also facilitate the code exchange

Would it be possible to Hide all annotations by default rather than each time a new workflow is created?   It's a simple thing but can save time.

Workflow configuration

Include a tool specific configuration to allow for the ability to turn off annotations on that specific tool instead of the global setting to turn them all off.

This would especially be useful for the SORT tool.

I find myself wasting multiple clicks in order to eliminate the annotations every time I insert a sort tool into my process flow, since it is rare when I actually need to include an annotation.

When creating a series of workflows, it is most common to run each tab in order from left to right. When saving them as workflow group, the order is not preserved and cannot be controlled. Recommendation: Always open workflow group tabs in the order at time of last Workflow Group save.

The Find and Replace tool currently replaces text or appends fields by reviewing the first word in the string and evaluating if there is a matching value in the lookup replace table. If there is, it returns the replace text or it continues onto the next word in the string and repeats until a match is found or not found.

However the functionality should be that the entire string is evaluated and the first match in the replace lookup table is returned. This is similar to how the VLOOKUP formula functions in Excel. 

This makes workflows easier to maintain as the ordering of the lookup table can be amended to return the appropriate value. The ordering of the source string is far trickier to automate/change. 

I have seen workarounds where append fields is used to append all lookup values to each row and then find rows which contain the string and use a sample tool to return the first row, however this causes processing issues when working with large number of records/ lookup values.

The functionality should either be changed or at least a setting which can be toggled to switch between the two options.

Hi all 

Currently when you set your workflow to don't write outputs (disable all tools that write output) under runtime of the configuration of workflow- the render and green output tools become greyed out and do not write an output (as expected). 

However, this is not the case for connectors - for example, if you use the SharePoint output tool and click disable all tools that write output, it will not be greyed out and still write an output. Is it possible for these connectors to also not run when this is selected in the configuration? As otherwise currently, you have to add it to a container and disable it.

In conjunction with the "First N% of Rows" and "Group by column (optional)" features, an additional option that would be great to have would be to tell the tool to take at least 1 record per group. If I am telling the tool to take the first 3% of records and grouping by a field, but one of the groups only has 5 records, it won't return any records for that group, as 3% of 5 is .15, so the tool rounds that down to 0. If I could also choose an option for the tool to always round up, that would also be sufficient.

In the formula tool, you can generate uniform random values using the RAND() function.

I would like to have similar functionality to get normal random values by calling RANDN().

As a workaround, the values can be produced from a Python tool using 

numpy.random.randn()

Python documentation on numpy.random.randn.

The full script below produces 100 random normal values in a column called 'Normal_Rand'.

The zip file has both a direct workflow and macro solution to produce the random normal values.

Would like to have the ability to filter to searched fields. Having the ability to search for already known fields, and then selecting those fields, temporarily, and isolating them for view. While there is the selection of fields under "X of Y fields", this still requires manual clicks and could be tedious when there could be a large amount of fields.

While you could also use the SELECT tool, that would still require manually searching for the field and isolating it for viewing. This could possibly be an enhancement for the SELECT tool or it could be an enhancement for the "X of Y fields".

I'd like to suggest that Alteryx make annotations able to be hidden or visible by right clicking or hovering over a little highlighted corner similar to comments/notes in Excel.  Have a highlighted corner of tools when there is an annotation. When hovering over the colored corner, user is able to view the annotation otherwise it is hidden and out of the way of the tool box. 

Hello all,

My idea is very simple, and this is most likely I'm used to do. After highlighting the fields in the select tool, the next action is to click Options and to apply what to do. My idea is just after highlighting, right click on mouse button to go exactly on Options menu. Just a simple right click. I think this behavior is most likely comes from Microsoft, I'm used to select multiple lines or cells and with right click to do the next action. It's a simple, but powerful. What do you think?

Albert

The DateTime Tool currently displays incoming date-time data types in a dropdown menu and "If no date-time columns are present, the field appears dimmed and shows 'No Suitable Input Fields Available'". However, considering the complexity of date formats, it's beneficial to directly view the data type of incoming date-time data instead of relying solely on visual inspection. While Designer filters options based on string or date/time types automatically, having visibility into the data type ensures a more sound interpretation of the input for analysis purposes.

When making changes to a UI, it would be beneficial if I could move objects horizontally instead of only vertically. Additionally, being able to resize items in the interface designer could improve end user experience. Currently I have List Boxes that are cutting off some words in a workflow and if I could extend the box or wrap the text then I wouldn't lose any context. 

The second idea is the freedom to sort the workflows in collections that I control in anyway that I choose.