Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

How about a “Temporarily Disable Tool” feature where the tool is disabled?  Just the same as the "Disable All Tools that Write Output" but would only apply to the specific tool you select.   But, Instead of having to delete or cut the tool and connect around (as this can be tedious)!  The feature could be applied to various preparation tools (and potentially more) to help save time.

For example, there are occasions when I might have a filter applied and would want to temporarily disable the tool only to see all results.  This has been the case when I have wanted to include hospital wards (by temporarily disabling the tool) I was filtering out to review in the summarized totals.

The specific tool could have the same hashed marking as the "Disable All Tools that Write Output".   The "Temporarily Disable Tool" feature could be listed when the specific tool is right clicked on.   - The workflow could also prompt to show that the user has a tool "disabled" to highlight to the user.

Edit: Spelling

It would be oh so nice to be able to copy a container's properties and paste those formatting options onto other containers.  It could be accomplished through a Paint Brush icon on CTRL-Copy and Right Click to paste format.  either way it would save setting the Color (multi-step select), Margin, transparency.

Cheers,

Mark

Hello all,

The reasons why I would the cadence to be back to quarter release :

-for customers, a quarter cadence means waiting less time to profit of the Alteryx new features so more value

-quarter cadence is now an industry standard on data software.

-the new situation of special cadence creates a lot of frustration. And frustration is pretty bad in business.

-for partners, the new situation means less customer upgrade opportunities, so less cash but also less contacts with customers.

Best regards,

Simon

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

Whenever I overwrite an Excel sheet with data of the same format just different values (e.g. Q2 data versus Q1 data) all of my Pivot Tables break and I have to manually recreate them even though the schema didn't change.  Somehow the Table is being deleted/removed and replaced with a completely different Table which is what causes the Pivot Tables to break.  The only way to avoid this is to manually set the Cell Range, but who has time for that?  The only solution I have found is to manually copy all values and paste them over the existing data which is very inefficient the more sheets you are working with.

My request is to allow navigation to specific System settings without having to click through the entire process to get to the specific section of the settings you want to change.

I was setting up a rather large set of repetitive filters and formulas and when I got done, I wanted to select the output of each tool all at once to drag them in to a Union tool. I think it would be great if you could hold the control key to select multiple outputs to drag to the next tool at a given time. 

After multiple years of using Alteryx, The tabbed document feature was left out of 2022.1.  This feature allows for a much cleaner canvas for exploring workflow and output data.  I view this feature as a basic function of Alteryx, I was surprised to find out that the development team intentionally omitted this function.   I really don't want to revert back to older versions but it may be only the way to have a more comfortable feel of Alteryx.

The basic premise is this: 

Phantom spacing. Basically something that looks like it has spaces on Excel but is actually formatted as an indentation. 

Unfortunately, to read the indentation we will need either a VBA prep or read the XML inside. The latter of which is difficult. 

As to VBA, the general steps are to create an indentation formula in order to see the numbers, then go from there. The idea is credited to @clmc9601 as we discussed privately.

As of now, I do not see anyway to do this on Alteryx as a function or even expression. It would be very helpful especially reading trial balances or even Bloomberg outputs as they are formatted with indentation. 

Reading indentation from Excel or any other file within Alteryx will be much appreciated, especially in actuarial and finance spaces. 

Would love to have the ability to connect S3 to alteryx using the AWS IAM role instead of needing an AWS access key/secret key.

IT will not hand out the Access/secret key so it would be great to connect to S3 without needing a password.

Hi,

Would be helpful to have an Input and Output Tool for ProjectOnline like the SharePoint and OneDrive Tools.

This way we can read the projects in a tabular form and automate our project management tasks.

Thank you.

When you start using DCM - you may have existing canvasses which use regular old connection strings which you want to migrate to DCM.

Currently (in 2023.1.1.123) - when you select "Use Data Connection Manager" - it shreds the configuration of your input tool which makes it difficult to just convert these from an existing connection to a DCM connection

The only way to then make sure that you don't lose any configuration on the tool then is to use the XML editing functionality of the tools and copy across your old configuration.

Could you please add the capability to keep my current tool configuration, but just change from using a regular old connection string to using DCM?

Many thanks 

Sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

There needs to be a way to step into macro a which is component of parent workflow for debugging.

Currently the only way to achieve to debug these is to capture the inputs to the macro from the parent workflow, and then run the amend inputs on the macro. For iterative / batch macros, there is no option to debug at all. This can be tedious, especially if there are a number of inputs, large amounts of data, or you are have nested macros.

There should be an option on the tool representing the macro in the parent workflow to trigger a Debug when running the workflow, this would result in the same behavior when choosing 'Debug' from the interface panel in the macro itself: a new 'debug' workflow is created with the inputs received from the parent workflow.

On iterative / batch macros, which iteration / control parameter value the debug will be triggered on should be required. So if a macro returns an error on the 3 iteration, then the user ticks 'Debug' and Iteration = 3. If it doesn't reach the 3rd iteration, then no debug workflow is created.

Under the Runtime setting, there is an existing option to "Disable All Tools that Write Output". This is incredibly useful when developing workflows when you don't want to overwrite existing files.

But this option doesn't disable all outputs, like Publishing to Tableau! 

I suggest adding the option to disable ALL kinds of outputs, uploads, and publishing (except possibly logging and caching).

A "Filter" that would work like a "Formula" - where you can add multiple criteria in one space, and for each criteria, you would get an output anchor.  I use Alteryx to manage master data from several factories - each needing to have separate workstreams.  Stacking Filter criteria functions, but it would be much cleaner to have it managed within a single tool.

Taking inspiration how you work with Jupyter notebooks and use the notebook to show your workings,  wouldn't it be great if you could document your workflows directly on the canvas more in a notebook style.

I think this essentially can be summarised down into two features:

1) Markdown functionality in the comment tool

2) Ability to import results from IRG and  / or browse tool directly into the canvas.

I have mocked up a version of what this could look like in the screenshot below.

Overall I think it would improve the experience of documenting workflows as you can show your workings in-line while building the workflow. Plus it solves the debate around team vertical vs team horizontal as you build using both! 

Hi all,

I think it would be great if Alteryx could send calendar invites in Outlook (and perhaps other calendaring systems) like it sends emails.

Currently the only way to accomplish this is to send it as an attached ICS file on a regular email.  

In my use case, rather than auto-populating a Shared Mailbox/calendar, someone has to go into the inbox, the email has to be opened then the ICS has to be clicked on to interact with.  

There are ways in Outlook to send an item like this but have it appear automatically without the end user ever seeing the actual invite.  (Our Company adds holidays and other important dates in this manner)

So basically I want this functionality available in Alteryx to do the same.  I have posted about it before in the discussions threads, but basically right now we enter our time in HR system, then have to manually enter the same info on our personal calendar in Outlook and any team calendar whether it be a SharePoint calendar, a group calendar in Outlook etc.

If Alteryx had the ability to send these types of invites, employees could enter the info in our HR system then Alteryx can get the data feed and automatically populate the other calendar (whichever type it may be).

Hopefully this gets some likes.  

Can we have a User Setting that allows the users to select if Alteryx should prevent the computer to go into Sleep or Hibernate mode when running a workflow?

It would be great if you could include a new Parse tool to process Data Sets description (Meta data) formatted using the DCAT (W3C) standard in the next version of Alteryx.

DCAT is a standard for the description of data sets. It provides a comprehensive set of metadata that can be used to describe the content, structure, and lineage of a data set.

We believe that supporting DCAT in Alteryx would be a valuable addition to the product. It would allow us to:

• Improve the interoperability of our data sets with other systems (M2M)
• Make it easier to share and reuse our data sets
• Provide a more consistent way to describe our data sets
• Bring down the costs of describing and developing interfaces with other Government Entities
• Work on some parts of making our data Findable – Accessible – Interopable - Reusable (FAIR)

We understand that implementing support for this standards requires some development effort (eventually done in stages, building from a minimal viable support to a full-blown support). However, we believe that the benefits to the Alteryx Community worldwide and Alteryx as a top-quality data preparation tool outweigh the cost.

I also expect the effort to be manageable (perhaps a macro will do as a start) when you see the standard RDF syntax being used, which is similar to JSON.

DCAT, which stands for Data Catalog Vocabulary, is a W3C Recommendation for describing data catalogs in RDF. It provides a set of classes and properties for describing datasets, their distributions, and their relationships to other datasets and data catalogs. This allows data catalogs to be discovered and searched more easily, and it also makes it possible to integrate data catalogs with other Semantic Web applications. 

DCAT is designed to be flexible and extensible, so they can be used to describe a wide variety. They are both also designed to be interoperable, so they can be used together to create rich and interconnected descriptions of data and knowledge.

Here are some of the benefits of using DCAT:

• Improved discoverability: DCAT makes it easier to discover and use KOS, as they provide a standard way of describing their attributes.
• Increased interoperability: DCAT allows KOS to be integrated with other Semantic Web applications, making it possible to create more powerful and interoperable applications.
• Enhanced semantic richness: DCAT provides a way to add semantic richness to KOS , making it possible to describe them in a more detailed and nuanced way.

Here are some examples of how DCAT is being used:

• The DataCite metadata standard uses DCAT to describe data catalogs.
• The European Data Portal uses DCAT to discover and search for data sets.
• The Dutch Government made it a mandatory standard for all Dutch Government Agencies.

As the Semantic Web continues to grow, DCAT is likely to become even more widely used.

DCAT

• Reference Page: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
• Dutch (NL) Standard: https://forumstandaardisatie.nl/open-standaarden/dcat-ap-donl
• WIKI Pedia on DCAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Catalog_Vocabulary

RDF

• Reference Page: https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
• Dutch (NL) Standard: https://forumstandaardisatie.nl/open-standaarden/rdf
• WIKI Pedia on DCAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework