Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When manually configuring a Union tool within a module/app, once it's saved, if you go in at any point in the future, and change anything upstream from the Union Tool, it causes an error "[some field name] has been changed and the Union Tool needs to be reconfigured".

This happens even if you do not reconfigure any upstream tools, but mearely access them, physically move them, say, an inch to the left or something like that, etc.  Basically if you just "touch" any tool upstream, the Union Tool thinks that the manual config needs to be done over.  But even if you do reconfig the Union Tool (either delete it and bring a new one in, or change the current one to Auto and then back to manual), it STILL does not recognize the tool as being correct.

The only way I have found to correct this issue is to click Play, and let it throw the error.  Add Select Tools before the Union Tool to change the names to be common, then click on the Union Tool, and switch it to auto.  Then click Play again.  This can be very inconvenient if you have a module that takes hours (although you can limit your input records).

My suggestion would be to either disable the manual configuration, or add notes to the Help Files stating to use the manual configuration at your own risk, because once it's set and works at the time of creation, you cannot modify any upstream tools thereafter or else it will break the Union Tool and it cannot be repaired -- only choice is to use the Select Tool as I described above

I would like to work with percentages in a format similar to Excel, where the number remains a double for input, exports, and formula calculations, yet has an option to show the number as a percentage on reports and rendered outputs. 

When developing modules and looking to refactor/improve areas where tools should be placed into a macro (for re-use, or for module cleanliness), it would be nice if I could simply select all the tools that should be in the macro, right click, and have an option to "Create as Macro". The option would create a new module/macro, copy the tools to the canvas, and create the necessary macro inputs and outputs automatically. Additionally, the original module could be updated to replace the selected tools with the newly created macro.

I really like the Tool Container. I also really like to have neat and tidy modules. Sometimes though, the two are in conflict because the Tool Container automatically sizes itself so I end up playing around with tool placement to get my containers the same.

Could you please add the option to make the Tool Container a sizeable object (like the Explorer Box) or give width and height value boxes in the tool properties?

After visiting with a new user who was not sure how to set up a filter, we came up with the following idea.

We would add a "simple" option to the existing Filter tool with some basic controls that would automatically create the expression for you.

Do others think this would be helpful?




Geoff Jones
Alteryx, Inc
Product Manager – User Experience

Currently In tools like the select and join you have the ability to sort the field order by ‘Field’. As I understand if this sorts the fields by ASCII order from the smallest to the largest character that you can display.
 
The English-language ASCII sequence is consistent with the order shown in the following:
blank ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z[ ] ˆ_
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { } ~
 
I would find it very useful to have the ability to use a dictionary sort in these tools.

It would be very useful to be able to add trendlines (linear, power etc) to charts (particularly scatter graphs) as in Excel.

Whilst not quite as efficient, the ability to overlay a line graph onto a scatter would enable the user to achieve a similar result as the points for the line can be calculated.

It would be nice to be able to append to a YXDB instead of having to read in the whole thing, union the new records, and then re-create it. 

Whenever Alteryx recognizes a field as a Date, it should default to Date, not Date/Time. I don't think I'm in the minority, but I rarely need to see the date AND the time. 99.9% of all of my date fields do not have a time associate with them; such as: Open Date, Close Date, Remodel Date, Lease Expiration Date, Lease Start Date, Date Record Updated, Relocation Date, etc., etc., etc. So I always get results like 4/1/2013 12:00:00, which makes it difficult to query against without changing to just Date. I would venture to guess that most people don't use the time either, but I may be wrong. So, defaulting to just Date would save a lot of us that extra step for each date column.

It would be good to be able to fix pie chart colours (either automatically of manually), so that when building a report, categories are given the same colour throughout the report across multiple pie charts.  Currently, if the number of categories being shown varies, there is no way to manually align the colours (In the Bar Chart type there is a Style Mode for the Series where you can use a formula to assign a colour based on a criteria such as the name, but not for pie charts).

 

In continental Europe, decimals and comma are used differently.  The number 1,345,678.99 would be written in some countries as 1.345.678,99

As a suggested enhancement request, it would be good in the Alteryx user settings to be able to select a country style setting to be applied to numbers throughout the software, such as in a browse, table, report etc. so they are displayed correctly for that user.