Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be great if Tool Container margins were adjusted so tools inside could snap to the grid perfectly. Right now they are just a pixel or so off and it creates slight crooks in connectors. (Minor I know, but it would go a long way to make canvases look clean)

Example:

So when you double click a word in Any other program it only highlights that word, for fast easy replacement

ex. [Field Number One]

If you double clicked any of these words in any other program you would only highlight JUST the word.

In Alteryx if you double click the same word you're gonna grab the space to the right of the word AND THE BRACKET on the left making the double click functionality useless.

Please fix.

Hi there,

As we all know - the Alteryx toolbox is along the top of the screen, and it takes up quite a bit of real-estate.

Can we give the users the ability to pop this into a vertical tree on the left hand side like in RapidMiner or Visual Studio?    This will free up screen space, and the search box can then move directly into the top of the tool tree (which lessens mouse movements on every search)

Alteryx

RapidMiner

Visual Studio 2017

When opening an Excel workbook or Word document, the Microsoft start screen enables users to minimize or cancel opening. These would be convenient features to add to the Alteryx start screen. Because the Alteryx start screen appears in front of everything you have open, I feel the ability to minimize it would add a lot of value. Additionally, the ability to close it would be beneficial for those times when you accidentally click the wrong workflow, for example.

Hit F2 when a tool is selected or click on an existing annotation box to quickly edit it.  Would save a bunch of time having to move the mouse to that left tray etc.

I use large workflows with multiple comments and tool containers to document and organize the different sections of the workflow. The issue I continue to run into is whenever I have to move or edit a comment box/tool container or a tool within a comment box/tool container my AlteryX freezes up and becomes unresponsive for a period of time. This issue seems to happen more frequently if you are sharing your screen. Has anyone else experienced this lag? Are there any work arounds to minimize the down time when using comment boxes or tool containers?

Sometime you have two or more workflows open in one instance of Alteryx and you want to easily be able to compare and/or  copy/paste.

Not a big need, but it would be handy to either be able drag the tab to the desktop to take that workflow into a new instance of Alteryx or to right click on the tab to open in a new instance of Alteryx. 

Connecting tools that are far apart in a big workflow is challenging.

My suggestion:

When you right click on the tool you want to connect FROM one of the menu choices would be "Connect From" which you would select. If the tool has multiple outputs (like a join for example) there would be a sub-menu with list of outputs.)

Then you would navigate to the tool you want to connect to  (I use the overview window all the time) and right click on the tool you want to connect TO and there would be a menu choice "Connect To". Again - if there are multiple inputs then there would be a sub-menu.

I'd expect Alteryx to remember the tool you connected from, so if you wanted to connect to multiple tools (say from an input file) you could just go to the next tool and right click and "Connect To" would be available.

Cheers,

Bob

Idea: Create a UX feature to provide a cursor area magnification.

Problem: One of the challenges of working with Alteryx is quickly navigating around the canvas. Traditional software editors have bookmarks or anchors that let you quickly jump to predefined parts of the code.

Alteryx does not have these. Instead, the tools available are the Find tool, Zoom tools, and the Overview window. While capable, they still require a lot of typing and clicking, panning, zooming, etc.

Solution: Create a small magnification window that would follow the cursor around the canvas. This is commonly known as a Loupe feature in many image editing software such as Aperture.

Benefits: This would allow a user to have a full view of their entire workflow and yet be able to see and configure a specific tool with ease.

Activation: I think this feature could be activated in two ways.
1 - The user could toggle the feature by clicking a keyboard shortcut
2 - The feature would automatically enable once the zoom was out beyond a predetermined level.

Options: The user would be able to shrink or enlarge the size of the magnification window.

Example: I've mocked up an image of what this might look like below.

Please create a hotkey to close a container. I have to scroll over and up to close a container and it wastes a lot of time.

I would like to see a Full Screen View under View on the Menu Bar.  Once selected your workflow would show full screen with out all the other side and bottom windows.  You could leave just the Menu bar showing so the workflow could be ran.  This would be nice for presenting/teaching.  Also, maybe have it default to cntrl 0 so the entire workflow is showing.  Zooming in and out could still be done.  Then to Exit. Go back to View and uncheck Full Screen.  This would be easy and, I think, helpful.

I love the new global search option for introducing new users to functionality and seeing related community posts, but I also primarily use the search bar to grab tools and drag them onto the canvas.  The global search can slow down this functionality by waiting for search results to load and covering up the canvas.  This is particularly problematic if I have another window up side-by-side with Alteryx (e.g. SQL developer, Excel, Tableau, etc.) to view results or debug.  

We can see in this instance in 11 that I have a very small sliver of canvas visible.

Whereas in 10, there was still plenty of canvas during the search operation.

Granted the menu goes away once you start to click and drag, but having half of my canvas covered is still not ideal.  I also seem to have issues with the list refreshing and not being able to grab a tool at times.  

Another great enhancement would be to keep the global search in place for the search bar and add customizable keyboard shortcuts for tools similar to AutoCAD aliases.  This would keep the full search with help functionality in the bar, while providing users who have less of a need for help documentation with a means to add tools without clicking through toolbars.

Hey all,

We have a policy (similar to the best practices guide published recently by the Copenhagen user group - thank you @danielbrun2) that Alteryx canvasses should run without warnings.

However - some of the warnings are tremendously painful to track down. For example - a union that brings together 20 or 30 input streams which gives you a warning saying "not all fields contain field X".

Can we change this to multiple warnings saying "Input X does not contain field X" so that we click straight through to the offending warning?

Additionally - when there's a conversion error - we then have to run the flow again with filters and diagnostics to find the offending row. Can we have a way that alteryx automatically sidelines an example row so that you can solve it in one pass?

If we look at all the warnings with the intention of "how do we make this something that can be solved right now, without having to run complex diagnostics, so that the very next run is 100% clean" that would be a big help.

Thank you Sean

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Inspire-2017-Buzz/24-Best-Practices-for-Moving-from-Ad-Hoc-Analysis...

Currently you can just give a name to a connection:

But I would like to see the ability to apply additional formatting to a connection, most importantly color. 

Currently you can click on an individual tool and the incoming and outgoing connections will be color coded, but when working in a complicated workflow color coding would make understanding the connections easier, without the need to click on individual tools.

Just like the ability the right click on a tool and say "Make (incoming / outgoing) connections wireless" you should be able to right click on a tool and specify the formatting of all  incoming or outgoing connections.

Many times we create and work on multiple workflows that are similar or are tied to the same project, but when it comes time to save them we must save each workflow as an individual file.I think it would be great if we can mimic what MS Office/Tableau have done; allow user to save multiple tabs or reports/dashboards under the same file. It would be great if Alteryx will allow us to create multiple workflows under the same workbook which can be renamed, be tied to their own workflow schedules without having to be saved separately and can be tied under the same 'project' or 'workbook'. 

That has bugged me for years.

With complex ETL jobs, we often have a very similar ETL process that needs to be run for multiple different tables (with different surrogate and natural key column IDs)

While you can do a bulk-replace by opening this up in notepad (in XML format) - it would be better if the user could do a find/replace for all instances of a table-name or a columnID from the designer UI (a deep find/replace into all the tools).

This can also be used when a field is renamed in the beginning of the flow, so that we can update this for the remainder of the flow without having to do this by trial/error.

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

Hi there,

Apologies if Alteryx already does this - but I'd be curious to see if it would be possible to automatically add items to your favourites bar based on usage.

To test this, I've been doing a lot of macro work over the last few days, and given the frequency of using the Macro input and Macro output, I'd expect that they would have elected themselves onto my favourites list.

Again, apologies if the designer already does this

Sean