Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Dear Alteryx, 

One day, when I pass from this life to the next I'll get to see and know everything!  Loving data, one of my first forays into the infinite knowledge pool will be to quantify the time lost/mistakes made because excel defaults big numbers like customer identifiers to scientific notation.  My second foray will be to discover the time lost/mistakes made due to 

Unexpanded Mouse Wheel Drop Down Interaction

Riveting right?  What is this?  It's super simple, someone (not just Alteryx) had the brilliant idea that the mouse wheel should not just be used to scroll the page, but drop down menus as well.  What happens when both the page and the drop down menu exist, sometimes disaster but more often annoyance.  Case in point, configuring an input tool.

See the two scenarios below, my input is perfectly configured, I'll just flick my scroll wheel to see what row I decided to start loading from 

Happy Path, cursor not over drop down = I'll scroll down for you ↓

Sad Path, cursor happened to hover the dropdown sometimes on the way down from a legit scroll = what you didn't want Microsoft Excel Legacy format?

And you better believe Alteryx LOVES having it's input file format value changed in rapid succession., hold please...

Scroll wheels should scroll, but not for drop down menus unless the dropdown has been expanded.

Oh and +1 for mouse horizontal scrolling support please.

Whenever I output the Count using the Summarize Tool I am unable to tell it to sort the results by Count and am forced to grab a sort tool.  It would be nice to offer a sort option from within the Summarize tool itself instead of requiring a subsequent sort tool or to use the Results window to manually sort it.

I was exploring how to make the Outlook 365 tool run faster, and I noticed in my Action tool that there are Start and End Date parameters. However, they come across as these large numbers. I learned today from Alteryx Support that "The numbers you provided for StartDate (1725163200000) and EndDate (1726751052709) represent Unix timestamps in milliseconds. Unix timestamps indicate the number of milliseconds that have passed since January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC."

While I am attempting to build a custom macro myself, it feels like this enhancement could just be included in the tool itself! Relatively simply conversion using DateTimeDiff([#1],"1970-01-01 00:00:00",'milliseconds') 😊

Edit: it's there for the Calendar option, but ideally it could be included for the Email option too! And while you can you the search parameters, we could make it easier for the user.

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.

• Have anyone experienced the same error?
• If yes, is there any workaround to connect with M365?

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.

Hello

Cartesian product is a common issue when joining dataset with a bad key. What I suggest is an option to check if there will be a cartesian product on the join tool.

-there is a label "Cartesian product (non join key uniqueness) detection"
-under it a drop down menu with three choices
-do nothing
-fail
-warning

Algo :
if do nothing==> well... do nothing more than actual behaviour.
if "fail" or "warning" : count distinct of join key versus count row on each side of the join. If none is unique, display a warning or an error message.

Best regards,

Simon

Hello,

Here is the proposal about an issue that I face frequently at work.

Problem Statement -

Frequent failure of workflows that have either been scheduled or run manually on server because the excel input file is sometimes open by another user or someone forgot to close the file before going out of office or some other reason. 

Proposed Solution - 

The Input/Dynamic Input tools to have the ability to read excel files even when it is open so that the workflows do not fail which will have a huge impact in terms of time savings and will avoid regular monitoring of the scheduled workflows.

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.

I would like to propose three feature enhancements for the Cross Tab tool under the Transform tool category.

1. Bringing Concat Unique functionality, which is an idea that is currently in Coming Soon status.

2. Adding Start and End in addition to Separator, similar to the Concatenate Properties found in the Summarize tool.

3. Changing the Default Size from 2048 to 1073741823 (max V_WString size). It is common for especially new users to ignore the truncation errors and potentially miss important data that may need to be processed downstream.

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

The management of connections, especially in a collaborative environment is not cohesive or intuitive.

1. When configuring an input tool for a server / gallery connection, hunting for the correct connection in a long list is quite frustrating.  There is no search, no sort and the list of connections does not sort in any logical order by default.
   SUGGEST:
   
   • List of Server Connections is sorted Alphabetically by default
   • Give the ability to search and sort
2. Add additional connection metadata
   • Primary Owner (add metadata element to Curator screen & surface in the connection list)
   • Secondary Owner (add metadata element to Curator screen & surface in the connection list)
   • Connection String (surface the server name and login name to the connections list, omitting the password)
3. Rethink the concepts of RCM, Gallery Connections and the external file method of storing credentials for In-DB connections.
   • Make one overarching, cohesive method of storing and sharing credentials across the platform.
   • Enable Artisans to create
   • Enable Artisans to share
   • Retire concept of external files to store credentials, as is used with In-DB connections

Currently when a unique tool is used, and a field is removed upstream then the workflow fails to move forward. If you have one or two unique fields being used then it is no big deal, but when you have a very complex workflow then you have to click into each one of those tools in order to update. This can be very problematic and creates a lot of time following all the branches that is connected after the 1st unique tool is used. My suggestion is to make this a warning instead of a fail or have an option to select fail or warning like the union tool is setup. This way people can decide how they want this tool to react when fields are removed. 

Few ideas for boosting the expression editor:

1) When writing expressions it can be hard to trace the matching brackets. Can we add some corresponding bracket colours to address this.

2) When I want to wrap an expression in brackets ([{or other symbols!}]) I have to manually add a bracket to the beginning and end of the expression. In Jupyter Notebooks (and many other softwares or IDEs), you can highlight a string, add a single bracket to it and it'll wrap the entire highlighted string with an opening and closing bracket. 

3) Multi-line cursor. This is a real gem of a feature if possible.

I will add a GIF that demonstrates all three together in action:

All the best,

BS

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

Create a connector for Azure Cosmos DB, integrate it directly into their Alteryx workflows

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.

Hello all,


As you all know, you can use API with the Alteryx Download tool. However, this tool is not that easy to configure.
On the other hand, the API world use a lot tools such as Postman  or Bruno (an open source clone) which allows easy test, debug... I use it everytime I had to work on a rest API and then I try to translate it to the final tool (such as the Alteryx Download tool). Both tools offer "collection", a set of request, and also environment configuration. Here are some examples on the project I'm working on :

And you can even get some code



I would like to leverage those collections in my download tool configuration, that would be quite easier to use !

Best regards,

Simon