Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be useful when building apps to be able to put interface tools in containers and disable them.  This would allow an app developer to show users multiple ways of having the app styled without having to have multiple app versions saved.  

Problem:

When searching for Alteryx help on Google the search results rarely return the current version of the Help documentation from the Alteryx website. Instead, what often happens is that an old version of the Help documentation is returned.

 

For example, a search for 'Run Commend Tool Alteryx' returns links for the 2018.3 and 11.3 instances of the help page:

 

 

These relate to prior versions of Alteryx and a better result would be to link to the /current/ version of the page (the URL for which never changes).

 

https://help.alteryx.com/current/RunCommand.htm

 

The problem above can be replicated for almost any tool or variant of search terms.

 

Since Google is such a crucial resource for troubleshooting, there is a risk that (a) users will inadvertently access out of date documentation and (b) users will be confused by the presence of multiple search results.

 

Solution:

By adding a 'robots.txt' file to web pages for prior versions of the tool these results can be suppressed from Google search results.

 

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

 

This should result in the /current/ documentation pages rising in search results and being more prominent when users search for help on Alteryx using Google.

 

Would be great if i could just select x number of tools and just say add to a new container vs creating container and then dragging into said container.

Thanks to members of this forum I have now got my head around how the Run Command tool works and find it incredibly useful. The documentation around the tool is minimal (only this community really...) plus the naming of the items isn't always obvious what values they expect to have entered.

 

This is one of the most powerful tools in the Alteryx toolset, with Run Command it's possible to do more or less anything you want using Alteryx, it's just unfortunate it's highly opaque how to use it with the existing documentation.

 

For example it's far from clear what input should come into the tool. I now know you can write a command line script in a formula tool and only bring that script into the tool, which will then create that script and save it based on the name given in the Output section. There is no way to know this using the documentation within Alteryx. Then you can run this script you have somehow created in the Command section just by entering the file path of this currently non-existent bat file.

 

How you're meant to know the button Input will then output the results of the script, assuming the script was written to output the results, is still a mystery.

 

Naming the components of the tool more appropriately would be a good start, although I admit not simple to do. Introducing a detailed help section with a few examples would be very useful and unleash far more Alteryx power to more users.

Hi all,

 

@PaulT put this list of keyboard shortcuts for the Alteryx Designer together in 2013, and it seems to not have been updated since then, and I cannot find a well-structured version of this elsewhere in Alteryx documentation.

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Keyboard-Shortcuts-in-Alteryx/ta-p/1188

 

Please could I ask that this be converted to a standard page in the Alteryx help documentation, and be structured into logical categories (example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/sql-server-management-studio-keyboard-shortcuts)

 

Many thanks

Sean

When building a workflow with testing tools, you tend to want to be able to put these in container and then minimise this to improve readability of the workflow.

For example instead of this:

You might want to minimise the error checks like this:

However when running apart from reading through the results window, there is no immediate indicator that there is a tool inside the container that has errored:

 

So the feature enhancement request is to add in an exclamation marker to show the user that a tool inside has an error and you can then easily open it up and investigate further.

 

 

After hitting "Test" in Workflow Dependencies:

Failed result = Bold red text (and a message)

Success result = Nothing? 

 

Maybe we could get bold green letting us know that the test completed successfully. 

It would be AWESOME if Alteryx had a feature to export logic that is within the workflow into a Visio, PDF, or Excel document to support documentation. Documentation isn't 'fun', but it is important/necessary.

Have a feature in Alteryx that automatically and dynamically creates documentation or a SOP standard operating procedure. I imagine the flow and connectivity of each process  would cause it to be easy enough to translate from a visual display into a written form. This would be extremely helpful to workflows that touch and handle data that has to be accounted for, whether that be through an audit or any other forms of IT controls.

Comment boxes should not have to be 'configured' like other tools.  After dropping a box on the canvas the user should automatically be able to begin typing to complete the box.  All modifications of text should be accomplished via a selection directly from the canvas and a right click to bring up an edit box or function similar to MS solutions.

When using Alteryx from an enterprise, the understanding of all of the known Alteryx domains should be documented.

 

https://www.alteryx.com/

https://community.alteryx.com/

https://help.alteryx.com/11.5/index.htm

http://downloads.alteryx.com/

https://gallery.alteryx.com

 

Are there more domains that should be put onto the white list or is that the total set of websites necessary to use Alteryx without firewall issues? 

 

When downloading files from Alteryx, we also want to list the types of files that we should allow users access.  For documentation, I expect that we will see PDF files.  For installs, either ZIP or EXE files?  

 

When it comes to setting rules, the more information the better.  Otherwise, users may be blocked and not able to use functions.

 

Thanks,

Mark

 

Hi Community,

I didn't have a clue where to post this. That is why I am sharing it here.

 

A small portion of the community users are content creators\community builders\people active on social media. Let's take me, for example. I am writing yammer announcements about Alteryx to our internal user group in my current company.

One of the materials that I recently started to share are weekly challenges, and I know other Alteryx communities that are internal often share them weekly.

I would love to have an opportunity to copy-paste some announcements that someone from Alteryx would prepare.

Please see the screenshot below as a reference:

 

 

The only thing that I would add is information about the level of difficulty + Main subject. In similar manner, to what we see on the weekly challenge index:

 

 

If this would be posted on the same topic week over week, community builders like me could follow a threat and copy paste a new post weekly.

 

At the same time, if someone would like to post it on social media. They can always showcase them on the network.

More information about Alteryx in many sources for almost free.

 

You must upvote this idea 😄

 

 

Now that spell check is implemented ( https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Spell-Check-in-Documentation-Tools/idc-p/343... ), it doesn't work like I expected.

To quote Jpoz :

 

The language check is based upon the language you selected in the installer when you installed Alteryx.

However, on my computer, Alteryx is set in French. On some project, documentation is also in French, on some others, especially when I have to work with foreign coworker, it's in english.

 

Can we imagine a language by workflow file, with a default coming from the settings. Something like that :

UI language (User settings)

Default WF language (User settings, if not manually changed, coming from UI language)

WF Language (linked the ywwf/yxmd/yxmc file coming from Default WF)

I've had to look through a few logs recently and I had expected the information to match with what is displayed in the results window

 

Reference the tool name, type of tool (in/out, prep, etc).   Only the toolid shows up in the log where the results window shows the name

 

In some corporate instances that I have encountered, browsing to the internet is not supported. What I've also seen is private instances of wiki media and yammer. Perhaps we could extend the browse to support these types of instances.

Cheers,
Mark

It would be really nice to have a pane or some sort of panel that would pull-up the documentation for a given function, rather than hitting F1, and going straight to the online documentation. Even making it available offline would be incredibly helpful for those that want to work without an internet connection.

Hey Alteryx,

 

Would it be possible for comment defaults to be "send to back"?

 

I use comments everywhere in my workflows and it's painful having to right click on each one and "send to back"

 

Ta

My employer just started with Alteryx, so I'm sure after a few months, this will be basic simple, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who has made this mistake, so there you go...

 

I was running a larger workflow that ends with outputting a table with about 80 columns.  Everything was working fine, except for one column, which kept coming up as all 0s.  Took me a while to find it, but the error all traced back to an error I made with a "Contains" function in a Formula node.

 

The Alteryx "Contains" function takes two arguments, 'string' and 'target'.  I interpreted this as 'find this string in this target variable', and entered two arguments: the string of characters I was looking for first, and then the name of the column I wanted to search in second. 

 

I think I had this backwards.  You need to enter the column name first, then the substring you want to look for second.  So the column name is the 'string' and the search term is the 'target'.  Me getting these reversed did not produce any errors or warnings, which I understand (e.g. maybe you might want to pairwise search for the text in one column in the text of another).

 

I think the terms 'string' and 'target' are kind of vague labels in this case (in Excel, for example, the analogous "Search" function takes the arguments 'find_text' and 'within_text', which is a lot harder to misinterpret).  So I would suggest changing the argument names in Designer and the online documentation, or at least adding text to the Alteryx Documentation (https://help.alteryx.com/2019.2/Reference/Functions.htm) that clarifies which is which.

 

Normally, I'd say this is a pretty minor thing, but since this is a potential 'silent error', I'd argue it's worthwhile.

 

(Also, the online documentation seems to imply there is a "CaseInsensitive" argument you can pass to "Contains", however I don't think there actually is.  May want to edit that for clarity.)

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

Hello,

 

From my experience, an SSD drive allows a big improvement of performance when the RAM is not sufficient and Alteryx has to swap on the temp storage location. It really changes the user experience. Also, I noted a correlation with the AlteryxProcessManager::Start : ConnectNamedPipe :  error : I think it happens less with a SSD.

Given that, shouldn't be a requirement or at least a recommandation?