Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The following idea might not be as valuable as some of @SeanAdams posts, but it would save this user precious fractions of time.   When I leave the canvas with my mouse (point A) to go up to the pallet I select and drag the tool down to the canvas.  Sometimes I do right-click and go through the menus to add the next tool, but generally I go through that labor only when I'm inserting in-stream the tool.  So here is my idea:

Double-Click your NEXT tool and it "Alteryx-ly" appears on your canvas in proximity to the hi-lighted (last) tool.  Better yet, connect it!  Now I can move from the pallet to the configuration panel directly without having to move my mouse down to the canvas and then over to the configuration panel.

Hopefully, my friend @Hollingsworth will find this time-saving idea worthy of a star.  Speed demons like @NicoleJohnson and @BenMoss might not need this turbo boost, but at my age it is worth the ask.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi Alteryx Designer Dev Team,

There are times where you want to create a variation of a particular pipeline and the data transformations in the beginning of the pipeline are similar but need slightly different configurations. To save time, can we have a right-click context option for each tool to be able to copy/paste or duplicate tool with existing configuration. This saves time by only having to change a few options in the duplicated tool. This is common for tools like, input, output, joins, groupings and reporting tools. An example where this functionality is handy in reporting: you may have a particular way that you always do your charts and instead of configuring the chart options from scratch each time, you copy paste the chart tool with current configuration and then you only have to make minor changes such as the data connections. 

Thank you

In the designer - when you attempt to open a canvas from your company server - you're given a search screen to find your canvas.

This search sometimes does partial string match and sometimes not - this inconsistency is confusing (full worked up solution in the screenshots below).

For example - if you search for the word "full" it will bring back "main - full download" but will not bring back "main - checkFullDownload".

Please can you change this search process to work on any substring of the canvas name - that is the intuitive behavior that users would expect.

Thank you.

I should be able to find this one if I use the word "Full" right?Nope - Full only returns canvasses where Full is at the beginning of the name; or after some whitespaceIt would be better if this worked with any substring

I just want to be able to make the width of annotations customizable. Yes, you can use comment boxes, but those aren't tied to any tools in any meaningful way. There is all this room to write out an annotation in the configuration window, but eventually on the canvas, it will be cutoff. Also, this isn't exactly the most friendly way to read.

I think being able to customize a canvas setting for max width would be awesome. It could be under the canvas tab of the workflow configuration. Additionally, the ability to adjust the width tool-by-tool could also be really helpful.

Hey @apolly 

You and the team have been doing a lot of innovative changes to the results window for data.

Could I ask for an uplift to the results window for Workflow Messages?

Summary: Error messages in the workflow results window cannot be fully viewed - have to be copied into Notepad and then reformatted before you can read.

Request: Allow user to double-click to see full readable version of a workflow result message

Detail:

If you have an error message in a workflow result - it gives you a message that is often longer than the window allows and there is no cell-viewer option

As a result, there is really no way to get to the important part of the error message to understand what's going on, other than to use Notepad

Step 1: Copy into Notepad

(you can see the end of line characters being misunderstood)

Step 2: Manually clean this up by breaking on the line breaks

And now you can see the important part of the result message..

Could we rather add the ability to double-click on a result message in the result window and bring up a modal window that formats the error message for you (similar to the modal window used for XML editing of a tool).   That would eliminate this entire wasteful effort of trying to read an error message and having to use Notepad?

Bring up a modal window, similar to this one; so that I can see the error without having to go to Notepad

The new Paste Before/After feature is awesome, as is the Cut & Connect Around.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Paste-Before-After/idc-p/510292#M12071

What would be even better is to allow the combination of the two. E.G. It is not currently possible to copy or cut multiple tools and paste before/after, as this functionality only works for a single tool that's copied.

Thanks,

Joe

I see many posts where users want to view numeric or string data as monetary values. I think that it would be friendly to have a masking option (like excel) where you could choose a format or customize one for display.  The next step is to apply the formatting to the workflow so that folks who want to export the data can do so. 

cheers,

mark

The eMail setup for the eMail tool and the eMail notifications are subtly different - in that the eMail notifications screen does not offer an explicit location for port.    This is important if the SMTP server does not use the default port.   You may be able to do this with : notation, but it would be better to create an explicit field for this.

No Port available on the eMail settings for EventsPort is available on eMail tool

Could you expose a link to the Keyboard Shortcuts (which is here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.4/HotKeys_Shortcuts.htm?Highlight=keyboard%20shortcuts) on the primary help menu (screenshot below)

This will allow people to get quicker in Alteryx by exposing these shortcuts to more users.

It would be nice if we could right click on a Tool from the canvas and add it to Favorites from there.

Dummy/garbage text is required in the "Write to file or database" field to be able to write files from fullpaths using the "Take File Table name from field" check box and dropdown (also horrible UX/UI IMO). Without which you get a uninformative "Cannot access the folder" error message.

This isn't obvious and makes no sense and should not be required. The User experience here is very unintuitive, can you review this component?

I'm really struggling with the documentation/examples and the UX around node configuration. I often will spend an hour or more trying to solve really basic issues despite looking at the examples.

Sifting through relevant threads on the forum is a chore.

A link to a subforum or even better a wiki subtopic would be helpful, placed beside the Open Example link in the top ribbon.

eg

I love the ability to setup the UI with the different windows (results, config etc) in the places that I want. However, once I have them setup I generally don't want to move the positions much again, resize windows in place, yes, but not move them all together.

I would love the ability to lock the window configuration in place so accidental drags on a title bar doesn't move the windows stay in place. I still want to be able to resize those windows in the space though.

Cheers

A very simple idea, the same principle as the existing filter but there is only one output (true) and there is an on / off button. This could gives users the opportunity to put in a "what-if" gateway into their workflow. 

For example, your stakeholder has asked you to use 'all the data'. Whilst building the workflow, you notice that excluding 2016 data gives you a more accurate / representative end result. However, it is not necessarily your decision to exclude the 2016 data. You put in the Valve Filter tool:

Valve Filter On = Excludes the 2016 data.

Valve Filter Off = Allows all data to go through.

You are able to turn the filter on and off, run the workflow and see / demo different end results (instead of using a traditional filter and creating a separate workflow or a duplicated arm of a workflow).

Until your workflow is complete, you do not always know the full impact of the parameters / decisions you make along the way. The Valve Filter could give users more flexibility.

When opening a saved workflow in Designer, the python tool does and jupyter notebook do not load, and instead displays a "404: Not Found" error.  This is resolved by refreshing the meta-data (or running the workflow).  But the message is confusing and would ideally be handled differently. 

Before 2019.3, you could edit the default annotation that Alteryx generated, but now if you go to change the annotation it's either 100% your own annotation or 100% the default annotation left by Alteryx.

I found it useful to retain a portion of Alteryx's default annotation (e.g., a long table name when setting up a database connection) while being able to cull the superfluous portions (e.g., didn't want to see the Source / Catalog). Now, if I want to retain the Table name I have to type it out.

Hello,

While working with Predictive models, I got confronted with this situation: 

The highlighted traces are linked to the box even though you click on an anchor.

It'd be much simpler to trace this spaghetti if, when we select an anchor, only what is connected to it stay highlighted.

IDEA: Click on the box, keep all output visible in blue, click on an anchor, anchor's output is visible in blue, the rest remains in black.

Like this:

(Drafted with powerpoint, not the best representation)