Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx current C5 implementation requires very carefully crafted data to work.

This is fine in an academic environment, however production datasets are rarely available with such low level of tolerances.

Competing products have implementations that will not fail as easily and Alteryx doesn't have any other multi-way decision tree option.

A good alternative would be otherwise a tool that does some dataset diagnostic so that we at least can know where the problem is without having days of data scientist time to comb the dataset.

Thank you,

Marco

Can we have string function that parse the string between 2 indices?

As FindString can find particular string occurrence,we can easily get required part of string easily from that index till required index.

or If we want entire remaining string we can have a function like:

Substring(String,StartIndex,EndIndex) Where endIndex can be : Length(String)-1

When enriching your date data, week information is pretty critical, I suggest adding %w to the format stings as well..

Several month based expressions can also be made weekly, data time first of week #31, last of week #45 etc....

Also came across a lot of questions at our community on how to turn week based data...

Writing the formula is obvious (Ceil(DateTimeDiff([Today],[Date],'days')/7))

but having a DateTimeDiff([Today],[Date],'weeks') is preferable don't you think?

Cheers

It would be nice to have the option to open a macro from the configuration window.  I often use the find tool to locate macros and sometimes they are in collapsed tool containers or buried under other tools and it makes it difficult to right click on the tool itself.  The find tool brings up the configuration window so if there was a button on that window it would make opening the macro more efficient.

Currently, there is a setting in the table tool to control the decimal places of all values by column. This is not only unnecessary, but it actually screws up any data that comes in where the ROWS may have different number of decimals. The only way around it is to convert everything into strings, which is annoying. Please just get rid of that column setting! Or enable the same setting inside the row rules. 

Hi - I was attempting to build a workflow as an analytics app that could notify the user with a message when there is fallout from certain joins that needs to be reviewed. Not all fallout is bad fallout, so I would not want the message to stop the workflow form running, but rather give a friendly reminder to verify that the fallout is okay or immaterial. It is my understanding that their is currently not a solution to this after speaking with the support staff.

Thanks,

Trevor

Hi,

Since the Geocoders create point data, having the spatial field recognized as a centroid can be helpful to the user. If it's marked as a centroid, it makes it easier for the user to differentiate between point vs polygon/line, especially if the user is already using polygon data in the module. If I do a Spatial Match or Join, I can have two fields called SpatialObj, which I have to track back to figure out which is which. If after combining, it showed Centroid for my geocoded points and SpatialObj for my polygon data. Kind of like you do for the Create Points tool, if I use that the field is called Centroid.

Thanks,

Field selection in Multi-Field Formula seems to be 'All' or 'All of a Type' or, potentially, lots of manual tagging.  I have >600 fields and want to select about 150 adjacent fields.  Is it possible to implement a 'mass select' option within the Multi-Field Formula Tool, as found in other tools?

Map input allows the user to connect the Q anchor to a file browse in order to navigate for a Reference Layer.

Please allow functionality for the tree input tool to do this as well.

Thanks!

I keep making the same changes to the table tool rules, using the same formulas when I build new reports. For example, Row Rule 1: Font, bold; Background Color, green; Row Rule 2; Font, bold; Background Color, blue; Row Rule 3; Font, bold; Background Color, yellow. Each is based on a formula:  IsEmpty([Column Name]). I do this over and over and over again. The only thing that changes is the column name. It would be nice to have the Row Style Rules saved so they can be browsed to" or inserted.

Still waiting for the Default Table Settings to include "CENTER" in the header tab.

recently loaded the new V11 and gettting used to it.  one immediate gripe is the new version of the Formula Tool no longer supports multiple field actions.  In the prior version I could change Data Types on many fields at once.  I could move multiple fields in a block at once.  there were a few other things but these are things I am sorely missing on my first use of V11.  I created about 20 fields in quick succession just getting names down and then going back and putting in formula which were variations on a theme.  When done I noticed the default DataType was V_WString and I wanted integer.  In the past it was no big deal because I could select the block or interspersed fields and then right click to change data type for all to the same data type.  it was very handy and now appears to be gone.  please bring these things back.

For some workflows I see the value of concentrate a high number of formulas in a single Formula Tool, specially when you have a considerable number of simple and independent formulas. This makes future changes to the workflow easier, since you (and other in your team) know where exactly to find the formulas in a workflow. But as higher the number of formulas in Formula Tool, more difficult is to find a specific formula in the tool.

My suggestion is to implement a sort option - so you list the formulas/columns alphabetically - and/or a filter option - bringing the relevant formulas/columns as you type. 

Since I am relatively new in the Alteryx world,I am not sure if there is an alternative for that (officially or unofficially speaking).

Thanks. 

Please consider displaying the count of records identified by the tool in the image of the tool on the workflow screen.  

This will save time when analyzing data: I will no longer need to copy and paste the values into a comment.  The value will be "captured" because I tend to print these particular work flows as pdf's.

Thanks,

Nick

Hi,

Love the new Select tool column view, going back to the whole column name showing up...AWESOME!! I was wondering if the same could be applied to the Summarize tool. I'm on Alteryx 11.0 and the column names within the tool are truncated (like the Select tool used to be), can you also format it to where the whole column name appears in the tool?

Thanks!!

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!

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.

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?