Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Please have the option to place Calendar tool side by side in the Interface Designer. Currently they are only allowed to be placed vertically i.e. on top of each other. By placing the calendars side by side, the interface will look more organized and intuitive to the user. This is particularly useful when there is a need for a companion calendar tool. For example, allowing user to pull data between a date range. In this situation, arranging Date1 and Date2 side by side will be intuitive than placing them vertically.

I've recently been playing with the 'Encrypt Workflow' capability within the platform, and it's great, apart from the fact that it is not possible to edit an encrypted asset, meaning users will have to store an unecrypted version of the file.

It would be great if the 'Serial Numbers' could be extended to allow certain users to be able to not only run the workflow but also edit the workflow. 

Pretty simple one, but one that would be hugely valuable, preventing the need to maintain an unecrypted version of the workflow on your machine.

Ben

For more than 5 years It has annoyed me that numeric results in Designer are always awkwardly displayed as left justified. 

Nearly all conventional financial reports present numbers RIGHT justified with a vertical alignment of the decimal points and interval markers.   In Alteryx this convention is snubbed, at least in the Results Window, making it more work to interpret the results.

Given that Alteryx would like to sell more Designer licences 🤑 to those millions of accountants 🤕 still struggling in Excel hell , it would seem to be a smart move to concede on this small point. 

An easy way to deliver this enhancement would be either (1) via a user setting or (2) an enhancement of the   "Hide Numeric Separator" toggle in the upper right corner of the Results window:

Currently the Find Window is the only one not located in the View menu. It would be great to have it located either just under view or under both Edit and View. Most users are aware of the other windows once they discover the View menu, however I feel they are missing a lot of the new features with the new Find Replace functionality available in the Find Window. One looking at it under the Edit window it just looks like a simple Find, not like a whole new window that can be used as part of your Designer experience.

All other window options are located here.

Current Position for Find

I could not find any helpful document to connect to Azure Databricks to read data directly as an input. I was able to configure it and sharing it for others with the screenshots 

Every time I open the Visual Query Builder I have to drag the internal table window to the left to make it bigger, in order to see the table names.

I really want to lock and hold the last position of this entire window - also the total window when I expand it.

This is driving my crazy! Please lock the window.

Create social and holiday themes for icons and set the canvas to an appropriate color.  Here's a world mental health day example:

If you need help, ask me how I did it.

Cheers,

Mark

P.S.  I realize that 2023 is next year.  Please don't wait that long :)

In many cases, I have several formulas in one formula tool. I'd like to be able to have all of these expanded whenever I select the formula tool that's in the workflow. Currently when I select a formula tool, I see "Screenshot Current". I'd like to have a setting available so that anytime I select this formula tool, I see something like "Screenshot Idea".

When I am working with 2 different versions of Alteryx (e.g., a current version and a beta version), I set different background colors for each version through user settings. This a great because I don't want to accidentally modify a current workflow when beta testing; the canvas color is a clear, but subtle indicator of which version I'm working in. 

Similarly, I'd like the option to set a custom canvas color for each workflow. Use case - I have two versions of a workflow, e.g., one production and one in development, both in the same version of Alteryx. I don't want to accidentally modify the production workflow instead of the dev workflow. My current workarounds are to open the workflow in two different windows on separate monitors or to add an obtrusive comment box making the dev version as in development. Neither is a great option. If I could set the canvas for the workflows to different colors, that would reduce the possibility of making this mistake.

My idea is to expand this the custom canvas-coloring functionality to allow users to set a custom canvas color for each workflow. 

In the Result window, user can expand the Column Width but not the Row Height, and cannot Wrap the text.

It's a kind of necessary user friendly feature to view the entire text easily.

Sometimes, if text is too large in each field, then expanding the column width for all the fields and scrolling left/right is really annoying.

It could be useful to keep track of changes to workflows by adding changelog notes to the Meta Info in workflow configuration

In python, there is this monthrange function which is very useful to find out the days in particular month and also particular year (leap year)

In python we will only have to do this to get monthrange

 x[i] = calendar.monthrange(Year_S, Month_S)[1]

whereas in Alteryx, we will have to do this

datetimeday(DateTimeTrim(DateTimeParse([START_DATE],'%Y-%m-%d'),'lastofmonth'))

The different are enormous and I can see that Alteryx team was able to add in this in a jiffy.

I was hoping we can simplify the code so that users wont have to go and dig around to find a way to get thru.

This will be helpful in doing calculations like insurance/interest premium, where we need to find the remaining days of in the month.

I think it would be a great idea where the system admin can control the logs and the location of the logs for all the alteryx designer users within an organization. This ensures that no data is being transferred outside the organization. 

Of course the workflow file name could include a version history, but it would also be neat to have a field within the workflow itself.

Please allow disable or ignore conversion errors in SharePoint List Input. 

In SharePoint List Input I see the same conversion error about 10 times. Then....

"Conversion Error Limit Reached".

Can you simply show the error once or allow users to choose to ignore the error? (Union Tool allows users to ignore errors).

I am not using that SP column in my workflow. Meanwhile I have to show my workflow to a 3rd party within the company. SO annoying to see errors that do not apply to my workflow being shown.

As of version 2023.1 once a workflow is locked, it cannot be unlocked. If Alteryx can unlock it, can it be made into a user option?

My idea has two parts. See the images for examples.

1. Add an option on the lock screen so the user can get an unlock passkey.

Passkey is either generated by Alteryx or set by user

2. Change the behavior when trying to open a locked file by giving the user an option to enter the unlock passkey.

Same behavior if there is no passkey

Dialog box with passkey input and cancel button if a passkey exists

This would be useful as a way to revise or edit a workflow or update the expiration date on the existing workflow without having to reload or resave a new file.

This is a general request for uniform methods of connecting to data sources. The management of data connections is currently varied, and configurations/updates are completely different across connections. 

Hi!

Under User Settings, if you could add options to change what Alteryx shows in the tool configuration window. Currently, it shows Field, Type, Size, Rename, Description. I've been using Alteryx for almost 20 years, I've never used the Description field for anything. If Alteryx provided the option to remove it from the view for users who never use it, then the Rename field would no longer get truncated, which is a field I think is more widely utilized.

There are currently many encoding options (see also: Input Tool Has Limited Varieties of Code Pages) that are available for use with Alteryx Designer (https://help.alteryx.com/2018.2/CodePages.htm), however only a certain number of them can be directly accessed from the interface. Providing the user an option to enable all possible encoding options (from User Settings) for the applicable tools could eliminate the need for building an analytic app just to pass the output encoding parameter to i.e. the Input/Output/Run Command tools.

One case this could be useful is when there are file/folder names with non-English characters and a Run Command tool is used to execute an operation regarding moving something from/to the folder, where the only option is to use an OEM encoding to be able to correctly pass the file/folder name information, otherwise the characters are not read correctly by CMD.