Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Every time I open a new workflow I start with a heading and subheading. 

• Heading: Verdana 8pt bold. Color=black. 
• Subheading: Verdana 9pt regular. Color=gray. 

The aim is to ensure I know what this workflow is for, the date, who it is for and what was happening around me at the time I created the workflow. This helps bring me back to the premise that kicked this whole thing off and puts me in the frame of mind to understand what was happening at the time I created this workflow. 

Occasionally in my workflow I'll have some comments, snippets of code and especially warnings for things to pay attention to when I open or before I run a workflow. 

It would be fantastic if the documentation palette can be expanded to more than just three tools to include some of these comment tools, or a customizable set of tools/macros that will allow me to just set it once and reuse them as needed to keep style and formatting consistent so that I can focus on the workflow while keeping everything documented and tidy. Bonus points for including one that allows me to put my logo/signature on the canvas too. 

My current workaround to this is putting all my styles in a workflow and having that open to copy and paste the comment and update the content. 

It would be helpful to differentiate between annotations that have been automatically generated, vs those that have been manually entered. This would help speed up "reading" workflows, and reduce any confusion that occurs when annotations have been manually amended - but might look like auto-annotations.

E.g. auto-annotations appear Grey, whilst manually edited annotations appearing Black? 

I'm digging the new holistic data view in the browse; however, there is one aspect of the old view that I miss: I liked the list of top values to be available without scrolling. Here is the current view of the new browse:

What are my top values? I either need to hover over the blue bars, or scroll down to see the list at the bottom. I would like the top values list moved to the top. For reference, here is what the old view looked like:

My top values are available right there at the top.

When I use the rectangular lasso to select some tools and/or control click them, I want to see a count of selected tools please.

IMO, Alteryx should bring new hot keys into newer version:

1. Search for tools, help, and resources

2. Search for Result windows: This is extremely wanted coz I always have to check, recheck results so it's so annoying to non-stop moving the mouse cursor to different positions

When a user adds a column in the Formula tool, show the data type directly underneath the column name, not below the expression. It's important for the user to set the data type and then build the expression. Otherwise, the user neglects to and then minutes or hours later sees strange behaviour as a result of having the default V_WString. Make the data type prominent because it is important and part of the metadata.

As reported in this post, I would suggest to only add new browse tools to outputs that do not have a browse tool attached already when using the "Add All Browse" feature.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Undesired-behavior-using-the-quot-Add-...

Thank you!

Alteryx should support horizontal scrolling!!!! urgently

My PC has Windows Precision touchpad (which might be a standard today), I can use 2 fingers to scroll up/down but moving left/right in Alteryx is another story, it's just impossible. That's extremely annoying when the licence cost for a user is so high. 

Hi Alteryx team,

Not sure if this is a Designer or Connect idea but the idea is to allow more options when searching in Connect from the Designer interface. As of now, it seems that it is only possible to search for tables and views, or generally those objects which can be added as an input data tool.

I believe that search directly from Designer is a great feature and at least our clients use it more and more. Would it be also possible to find workflows within Connect catalogue and open these workflows in Designer?

This could also apply to other data assets within the Data sources section like APIs, procedures etc.

Thank you

Michal

The desginer autosave feature is fantastic when you need it. However, it's pretty annoying when you don't need it as it seems like it:

• Autosaves blank workflows
• Autosaves workflows that are saved and haven't had any changes made to them

Hopefully all of the above can be filtered out from Autosave: 

The only workflow from the screenshot above that I'd want Autosaved would be the Parse Directory workflow as this is the only one which I made changes to:

- New Workflow1 - Completely blank

- PureGym Log In - Saved and no changes made

- New Workflow2 - Completely blank (however, I had dragged a tool onto canvas and deleted it, so something had changed)

However, Alteryx brings up all of the workflows:

I love the new right click and duplicate workflow feature, but I think the duplicated workflow that opens, should open next to the original workflow and not at the end of all of your already open workflow tabs...

cc: @jpoz @jeffv 

It can be daunting to find the tool that is currently being processed by the engine in workflows that contain hundreds of tools with many ins, outs, and branches. During runtime, I want to be shown the tool that is running on the canvas. This functionality should be in the form of a button or something to direct focus to that area. It should not be the default.

Alteryx Admin Designer
Version: 2019.2.10.64688

Use case: Improved accessibility of Designer functionality via Keyboard and UI Menus

Hello Alteryx Team. I am very new to the Alteryx world. As I continue to learn and go through training and tutorials, one thought occurred to me. Using Alteryx requires a great deal of mouse dexterity - especially as workflows grow in complexity. This could be extra-challenging or frustrating for users with limited mobility.

As a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, I found the Find Tool (CTRL+F) to be very handy when locating and selecting tools without the mouse. And the View Possible Connections feature enables the ability to link anchors without a mouse. Excellent! However, this handy feature seems only accessible by right-clicking a tool with the mouse. I'm unable to find an entry for this feature in any of Designer's menus, nor does it appear when using the Menu key on the keyboard (which brings up the Context Menu, aka Right-Click).

Perhaps this has been addressed in other versions of Designer. Or it might be a UI oversight. But in terms of accessibility, I feel it would be very useful.

Please let me know your thoughts or show me how to find it outside of right-clicking.

Many thanks,

James

During the Inspire APAC conference, I dragged and dropped a tool over another tool with the intention for it to replace the tool that was on the canvas. I didnt realise that it had not replaced the tool. I kept getting errors and did not know why. The error was because the original tool was still hiding behind my new tool.

Can we add functionality where we can replace a tool on the canvas with another tool by either:

1. dragging a tool from the tool palette over another tool and it replaces that tool with the tool from the palette (the tool being replaced will turn grey whilst you hover to indicate that you are about to replace the tool. 

2. Right-click an existing tool and similar to insert after context menu, a replace tool context menu appears to select the tool that will replace the existing tool.

Also, if you can include in user options, an enable/disable checkbox for this function as I am not sure whether everybody may want this but this is a productivity hack when you change your mind later in the type of tool you want connected. Drag and Replace is very intuitive action which is used in other design software platforms. The only reason I can think of where you would drag and drop a tool directly over another tool is to replace it. Say you have the join tool on the canvas and you really want a union. Or you want to replace the predictive model being run without having to delete and then drag and drop the right tool. These are 2 examples among others where you reduce the number of actions taken to replace the tool currently on the canvas.

Happy to elaborate with more examples if the above does not make sense.

I keep Connection Progress on "Show" by default. I find that the row count tooltips are crucial for spotting issues during development. Sometimes, the counts are huge and I have to mentally insert commas. Please give the option to add commas/decimals (based on US/EU standards) into the Connection Progress tooltips. Thank you.

Working across a large organisation inevitably leads to people using different drive letters when mapping drives/folders. This makes sharing workflows and macros with other teams more difficult and the first thing I do when creating a new workflow is change the dependencies to All UNC.

This suggestion is to offer the option to default all workflows to UNC via the user settings. Acknowledging that some users will prefer listing files by drive letter and other UNC, adding the option could make life a little bit easier for everyone.

When models are complex and extensive, it can be difficult to locate specific sections of a workflow despite any effort to organize the tools. I believe that it would be beneficial to have a feature that saves focused views of the model, e.g. zoomed into a specific location or set of tools, with a configuration of expanded or contracted containers.

The intent would not to affect the data flow but rather facilitate the data analyst's movement within the file.

Please see the (simple) example below, where the zone if red could be a saved view, onto which the screen would zoom and shift when selected.

Hi Dev team,

As well as this much needed UI feature to scroll through workflows https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Scrolling-functionality-added-to-Workflow-sh...

Could you please change the order of workflow names in the 'Active Documents' button to be ordered in the same order as the workflow tabs and not alphabetically as it currently is?

When you have more than 5 workflows open (or less if they have long names) it's so tricky to quickly and easily cycle through them to find the ones you need. This is especially important when demoing, training and presenting to others!

Thanks,

Joe

We have a need to be able to trace the lineage of fields being processed through Alteryx - and it has to be done at a field level to satisfy our regulator.   In essence, we have to be able to show exactly where a particular field came from, and demonstrate that we can trust this field.   NOTE: If we could do this - then we could also use this information to make EVERY canvas faster, by checking for unused fields and making suggestions to remove these unused fields early in the flow.

In order to do this - it would be great if there were an option to force explicit field names in the Alteryx XML so that we can trace a specific field.

• Alteryx currently only makes a note of a field name if it is changing that field which is very economical - but it makes tracing fields impossible.
• Desire is for every tool to write the field list to the XML definition for every field that it knows about (just like it looks in the UI)

cc: @AdamR_AYX @jpoz @Claje 

Example:

Here's a simple canvas:

- 3 fields coming in from an input

- Select tool with these 3

- output of three fields into a file

These three fields are not mentioned anywhere in the XML