Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.  

Hello!
I recently build a couple of workflows where i needed to union many parts of my data together. 

Take for instance, the following:

I appreciate this is an unrealistic workflow - but if i am splitting data, at any points, and doing different processes, i am going to need to union that data back together.

Now without my fix - the solution is to put a union tool onto the canvas, and drag each connection to the union tool. This is fine on a small scale, but when its 5+ connections this can become tedious.

My proposed solution, is similar to the 'cache and run' functionality, in that you can select many tools with Ctrl + Click, and at the bottom you have the option for 'Union Outputs':

And when clicked, a union is added to the canvas, following the furthest most right tool (or last clicked), and have a union setup, with all connections made:

Hope this makes sense!
TheOC

Alteryx to develop for the people who are Disable under American with Disability Act.

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! 

Often (like, a surprising amount of the time), we will be on a working session with a customer and I'll notice they will break a data stream connection in order to prevent downstream tools from running.  Of course, I always coach them to add a tool container to the downstream tools, then disable it but they continue to choose not to.  

I'd love to see a feature where we can right-click on a data stream, then select "disable downstream tools", which then auto adds (and disables) a tool container. 

Gif of current behavior I too often see below, thank you!

Hi Team,

This is very helpful if you add the run and stop option in scheduled workflow for Alteryx designer desktop automation. There is no option of pausing the workflow. this idea should be implemented that will make life easy who are running n- number of workflows.

Thanks,

Kaustubh

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.

Olá, não sei se classifiquei a ideia na caixa correta, mas eu gostaria de ver uma ferramenta, provavelmente na aba "Transformar", e que traria o subtotal e total de um conjunto de linhas, sem ter que construir um fluxo somente para isso. Acredito que com uma ferramenta, apenas, o problema possa ser resolvido, como no exemplo anexo, o que é bem fácil de fazer no Excel, por exemplo.

Adding "Lightning Bolt" connectors to the standard workflow tools to allow dynamic automation of the settings would be a game changer. I believe that this would enable us to create universally dynamic and adaptive workflows which could be used as drop in solutions for most datasets. This would turn the standard tools into a dynamic ones and dramatically reduce the tool count to accomplish dynamic tasks, and make complex workflows much easier to internalize. Making standard workflow tools more dynamic would allow us to easily dynamically incorporate conditional tests / values / fieldname selections / bypass / etc into tools like detour / filter / formula / unique / transpose / crosstab / summarize / Outputs / etc. I would also like to see the ability to utilize a bool field to bypass any given tool in a workflow. That way we could do things like conditionally bypass an entire formula tool which would dramatically simplify complex formula construction, turn on and off inputs / outputs, simplify error avoidance, etc.

In order to build complex dynamic conditional workflows with the current tool capabilities, most of us are forced to use custom macros (often a multitude of workflow specific ones as well), constantly add and remove formula created fields for message relay, and create complex multi-routings / tests / unions in a standard workflow with large numbers of tools and containers. This hides many of our tasks within short-term use fields / custom macros and it makes the rest of our workflows voluminous and less intuitive.

On the User Interface side, I recommend a simple approach. Next to the standard tool setting there should be a dynamic input option which allows you to select the source field in the lightning bolt connector. Next to that, there should be an icon that can be clicked on to pop up a short text description and a basic screen shot of data in the correct format for dynamic input. I would also like to see a check box at the bottom for manual tool "bypass" which can also be dynamically controlled. (This would especially be helpful on outputs, but it would also be helpful to allow formulas and filters to be kept in place for future use even when they should not currently be used) Turned off tools could be highlighted in a red background or something.

This would be useful for anyone creating dynamic and adaptive workflows, but it would especially expand Alteryx Designer's capability to attract more custom software developers like me.  It would dramatically reduce the need for a large number of complex workflow specific macros that clutter our systems. Users that find the traditional workflow tool approach easier for them could easily use the tools as normal by simply using the standard manual settings. Advanced users could simplify the creation of universally dynamic and self adaptive workflows.

Hi Team,

I have searched through the ideas board but couldn't find one relating to my current request so here's hoping that this can be implemented in future releases.

I have been playing around with Knime and find one feature very useful that you could build in.  Knime use the concept of a metanode, where you can collapse a bunch of tools (nodes in Knimespeak) into one single node and I believe that this can be a very useful feature.  For example, in some of my workflows, where I text mine using regex, (depending on the circumstance), I will have a bunch of regex tools to parse one string (see screen grab below).  In such instances, it would be great if all the regex tools can be collapsed into one meta-tool.

The most difficult part about quickly sharing Community Questions and Solutions is constructing representative "Dummy" data values as static Text Inputs that can be packaged in a workflow. Most of us are almost exclusively working with sensitive client and company data that cannot be shared. It would be great to have a tool that converted values over to dummy values based on the type of data in that field. Kind of like a dynamic find and replace that randomizes values, replaces occurrences with similar dummy values, or scrambles string values in an indecipherable way.

The tool output could directly update a connected "Create Text Input" tool, or it could be connected to a browse tool that could quickly be converted to a Text Input.

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 😄

I have a workflow that outputs to several files at once. If one of those files is open, an error is returned (of course).

It would be really great if Alteryx could still save any failed files down into a different folder or with a different name such as V2. 

If you've ever had a massive workflow with many ins, outs, and tons of tools in-between, then you may have wanted to run just portions of the workflow for testing/development/troubleshooting. I know I have. I have a workflow that normally takes many hours to run in Designer due to the massive data volume. I was only interested in tracing a bug in one specific output and found myself deleting tools here and then, piecemeal, until I could be certain that only unrelated branches and tools were gone. I then ran the workflow and found the issue in less time. What I would have liked to have done is to right-click on the output tool and select from the context menu an option to "Disable unrelated" or even "Delete unrelated". I want to delete any tool that does not directly feed data into that output through any and all branches including Joins, Unions, etc. The same options should apply to right-clicking on any tool. Thank you.

FILE==>Open Recent==>

(add the ability to Pin Favorite Workflows)

The Pinned workflows will persist at the top of your recent files each time you open your Alteryx Designer Application.

It would be very helpful if there was a tool that could stop the workflow without throwing an error. Currently, you can use the message tool to throw an error on a certain condition, and then enable the "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" option in the Runtime settings, but when the workflow is stopped in this way, many other tools don't function such as the Output Data and Email tools. Simply adding a tool that stops the workflow without erroring that also allows the other tools to finish their job would be great. 

Provide Desktop Automation with Workflow REST API to have the ability to start workflows from other corporate systems without expensive Server license in a small environment.

Can we have a comparison tool in Alteryx as we have in Adobe Pro for PDF comparison.

It will be of a great help to multiple people across globe.

To allow users to pull data from Power BI, eg. datasets and usage data, to allow it to be manipulated in Alteryx.