Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Admittedly I haven't used the Compare Workflows functionality too often in the past. In using it today, however, right away I found that navigating the workflows being compared wasn't the easiest thing to do. I'm open to ideas on how this could best be accomplished, but it would be nice to be able to navigate around each workflow simultaneously (currently you must move around in one canvas then click to the other then move around in that one separately). Maybe this would best be accomplished by one of the following ways:

 - Allowing scrolling in both tab groups at the same time ( i.e. if I scroll in one tab group, that same movement occurs in the canvas of the other tab group)

 - Allowing movement in both workflows simultaneously from the Overview window

 - Connecting the results windows for the two workflows being compared so that you can easily click to navigate to the tool/part of each workflow with changes with just one click

Presumably, if you're comparing two workflows, they should roughly have the same general layout so hopefully this sort of dual-tab navigation would be plausible (and could be turned off in settings if it is unwanted). I believe this would make it much easier to find and navigate to the places on both canvas where changes have occurred. 

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:

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.

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".

User settings currently only allow for setting a default fill color for containers. Would like to be able to set default text and border colors as well. Thanks!

I am working with complex workflows which use multiple files as input, located on network drives. Input tools are Input Data, Directory, Wildcard Input, Wildcard XLSX Input (from CReW macros).

Regularly, I experience very slow Designer when working on the workflows (Window freezes for quite some time), especially when working from home. Switching off Auto Configure did not really help because I the column list sometimes does not converge even after pressing F5 multiple times, and when actively working on workflows, I have to press F5 all the time...

To improve this issue, I would like to propose a "Disable Auto Configure of File Inputs" which would not watch the loaded files but still would update the configurations downstream. This could include to not check automatically whether Macro files on network drives have changed. F5 could be used to update all configurations manually.

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

when you bring in a comment box or tool container to your canvas it should come in with your preferred defaults for  fill colors, font color & size, etc.  I have specific color schemes to identify what my comments are for and one scheme that I use most often has font size, position & color, and background color that I have to set every time i bring in a new comment box.

 I LOVE working in Alteryx it because unlike excel you set a "macro" to perform repeating operations once and then ignore them to do your real work.  This concept should extend to the little things within Alteryx, i.e. settings for preferred defaults for comment boxes & tool containers. 

When working in the Designer, I sometimes have to undo changes. And this experience is quite often very confusing and annoying.

For every change in the workflow, you have to press undo once. However, quite often, one user interaction results in other actions such as automatic move of the donwstream tool, change of size of a tool container etc. In such cases, you have inserted a single tool but need to press undo a couple of times to get back to the original situation. It is, however, often not clear how often. In most cases, I fail using undo at the end and revert my changes by hand.

Please change undo towards undoing one user-action in one undo step.

In case there might be users who like the current behaviour, you might make this a user setting how to deal with the undo history.

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.

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 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.

Hi,

Due to our setup, we need to have the path defined as Environment variables, so they will point to different paths in case a user opens the WF locally or the server is running it.

The issue is that the path of dependency does not accept the windows defined variables:

Thank you!

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 

Issue

Users are not able to change keyboard shortcuts. Because some Windows keys take precedent, the Alteryx keyboard shortcut will not work. 

For example, I would like speed up performance by selecting Disable Auto Configure in User Settings, and rely on using manual canvas refreshes (F5). However, Windows is reserving F5 for the Snippet tool. As such, F5 does not work for me. And in this case, there is no button or drop down for manual refreshes. Corporate IT security prevents me from remapping my keys. 

Proposal

In user settings, allow a user to modify the full list of keyboard shortcuts.