Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would love a tool where I could do Weighted Averages etc.

Ideally be able to write: SUM(Price * Volume) / SUM(Volume) and it would work.

Could you please assess the idea of reverse engineering existing SQL code (in special inside DataWarehouse's code, thousands of LOCs filled with SELECT and JOINS) and replace it with Alteryx widgets?

Doing this will accelerate penetration rate of Alteryx products in large companies and dismantle IBM Cognos and their cousins.

http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Connecet-to-an-Orcale-Database/m-p/12575#M956

When use Sql-Server build Stored Procedure where list in the Input Data Tool. So able to work with SPs.

When I use Oracle build Stored Procedure where not list in the Input Data Tool. So not  able to work with SPs.

Oracle, Sql-Server and MySql you can build Stored Procedure.

It would be great if when Alteryx for this Databases have implemented the same functionality.

So it can not be made dependent on the using Database to decide for Alteryx. 

Mathias

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.

Pretty much only time I add Browse tools during development now is to get access to the Cell Viewer to examine values better. 

Would love to be able to do this on the output window

Can you devise a way to bring out the dynamic network visualisation on to Powerpoint.  Right now, we can only see a static image on a browser

Hi, I'm new to Alteryx; we've had for just about a month. We started publishing our workflows to Tableau and it's working great.

One issue I foresee:

User credentials to the Tableau server are updated occasionally. When this occurs, I will have to update the credentials manually in each workflow. 

The number of workflows we are publishing is growing. Is there a way to automate this process? 

In order to perform audit-trail logging - it would be valuable to have 2 new capabilities

a) environment variables which show the workflow name; filepath; version; run start date and time; etc.   For any worklows we build, we need to have a solid audit trail to be SOX compliant, so having this detail available as a data field to write and manipulate is essential

b) A logging component.   What would be great is a component that you can drop on a workflow, not connected to anything, which is able to trap the start; end; runtime; version; etc of a workflow; and commit this to any output data format (CSV or ODBC etc).   This logging tool would need to be able to capture the full runtime, so it would need to be the last thing that runs (which means it may need to exist in parallel to the main workflow in some way).    This is not currently possible with a complex workflow with outputs, because it's not possible to identify when the entire workflow ended; or the runtime (since output tools don't have an onward connector to pass flow-of-control to catch the final end-time)

Again, both of these are necessary to meet audit requirements for workflows and prodcution-quality ETLs for BI data warehouses.

Would be nice to make it so if I change from RowCount to index it all is linked together.

Something like a $FieldName$ which would automatically get substituted. 

Also nice in other formula tools, but most useful in places where name needs to be duplicated over and over

Would be nice to have the regex tool allow you to drop original input field and report and error if any records fail to parse.

It would be useful to have a function or a tool to convert a number into a currency like excel.  Where it would add the $ before and you could choose to have commas and a period for cents.  

ex:  

Input:  15978423.89

output:  $15,978,423.89

of course, i'm sure there would be a need for other currency values besides the '$'.  

415978423.89

Currently the Save Field Configuration, when used with fields in a different order does not give any indication that the ordering will not be saved and reused. It is possible people may use this option without realising.

This should be in the help at a minimum, perhaps in a warning box when used too, but ideally the renames and types should be applied to the columns they came from by Name - not just based on the order of the fields.

The "Field Summary" tool and several others have a configuration requirement that provides a list of fields to select or deselect.  The selection action is singular meaning you can only effect the action on one item in the list of many.  As the number of fields we work with grows significantly this becomes a time consuming and tedious task.

This should be enhanced to allow highlighting of multiple fields to select or deselect as we can do in tools like the "Select" tool.

The field summary tool is an excellent resource to get an overview of the data and spot targets for analysis or data cleansing. 

Unfortunately it has limitations either in the number of fields included or some combination of the number of fields and one or more of its attributes.   There is nothing in the documentation I found to make a user aware of this. When you exceed N  fields selected the system just hangs, indicating it is running but there is no connection progress shown and nothing seems to happen, even if you limit input to 1 record.

Through trial and error I found an approximate limit in number of fields I can include and still have it work.

I request that Alteryx update the tool help info and devise enhancements to dynamically load balance the tool so it can scale to the number of fields requested or at least warn when the limit is reached or approached.  The latter warning could be similar to the red font warnings in the formula tool when you have a malformed expression.  However a load balancing version is most desired.

The issue as it stands results in users wasting a lot of time trying to make the tool work as expected, then report it to support as an apparent bug in the tool which can be argued both ways.

I realize in the real world there are limits but in this real world we are seeing the number of fields to analyze increase significantly, especially when you have a data license and integrate 3rd party data to you own native data adding a hundred or hundreds more fields.

I know there is an idea for Dynamic Summarize, however I think with only small change to Summarize tool this could be achieved. 

If we set the Summarize to Group by all our dimensions but then use ListBox + Action to control which dimensions we want to select - wouldn't it be nice (ahh Beach Boys comes to mind) to be able to tell Summarize tool that if the dimension in group by is not found just ignore it? At the moment it throws an error. I just think such small configuration would achieve this, right? 

Please let me know what you think

Hi Alteryx,

I tried importing a file into my text input tool and I ran across this error.

Why is there a limit? Can we get rid of it since we're not living in DOS anymore.

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.

During execution the user cannot scroll around. Large workflows need to be shrunk to very small icons to be able to follow the progress. Either have an option to automaticaly center on the active icon or allow scrolling during execution.

I think that it would be nice to be able to append a Time Stamp to the name of a file in the OUTPUT Tool, as a Mainframe Programmer I could append a time stamp to file names this is helpful when doing batch jobs that are scduled on a server.