Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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

This idea has been superceded by "Paste Before / After"

Is there a technical reason why you can't navigate the GUI while the module is running? There can't be because it works using Overview. Can you enable the scroll bars?

Unlike 'Multi-row formula' tool, the 'Multi-field formula' tool's expression textbox doesn't word wrap. Please see below picture that shows how each behaves respectively.

Wouldn't it be better to make the 'Multi-Field formula' tool to behave the same for both consistency and ease of use?

Thanks,

Simha

It would be really usefull if we could invert the sequencial color scale when using pie charts. For example, there are times where the greater the number is, I need it to be more red. Sometimes, I need the oposite behaviour, higher numbers having less red. 

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.

When connecting to Oracle thru In-db

I've came across an awkward issue, somehow Alteryx can't read TNS that I've defined.

Eventually I've had a solution and this was not as straight forward as it should be...

1) There is an easy way to edit, update add TNS records, finding the file and understand and update it is not as straightforward as a non IT person to tackle

Here's some tablau links on how to do it... http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/setting-an-oracle-connection-to-use-tnsnames-ora-or-ldap-ora

2) Especially the In-db tool doesn't even look at that file...

It says enter "TNS Server Name" but it actually asks for an IP address and some credentials like

1.0.0.0.1/oracl,

you gotta write this in Help file,

You gotta have a better UI/UX design that helps the end user...

Best

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

Formula tool expression editor is very useful. However, I have remeber the syntax when I write expressions in other expresion editor like custom filter, multirow formula etc..

It would be very helpful if it were possible to have each data point display it's value on a line graph in the Interactive Chart tool.  While the tool is excellent, this added functionality would go a long way.  Since bar and pie charts already have this I'm curious as to why it was never made available for line charts.

I have a process where I output data to a database each week.  Because the database fields have a pre-defined/expected data type, I must maintain that same data type in my workflow.  However, I would still like Alteryx to determine the max size of the fields for string fields.  The Auto Field tool does both, and sometimes it might change the data type of a field based on the records being passed at the time.

The reason is because the output to the target database is fastest when you make the string field sizes as small as possible.  So, hard-coding the field sizes has inherent inefficiencies.

I would like to work with percentages in a format similar to Excel, where the number remains a double for input, exports, and formula calculations, yet has an option to show the number as a percentage on reports and rendered outputs. 

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.

For the split to rows function on text to columns, can we have an option in the configuration to warn/error on too many records being generated just like the append fields tool but replace the words appends with splits?

I found a great use for the visual Layout Tool which solved the formatting issues I was running into. Unfortunately it doesn't pass through additional columns from the source. This means that I am unable to use the batch rendering (the "group data into separate reports" functionality in the render tool). See images below.

Image 1: Layout keeps columns in output 🙂

Image 2: Visual Layout drops columns in output

 Cheers

With the version 2019.4 an option to open all autosaved workflows has been created. I liked it. It would be really helpful if I can open multiple workflows from gallery.

thanks

I realize a true "In-DB" version of the SharePoint tool may not be possible due to the complexity and layers to get to an actual SharePoint Database. However, would it be possible to add some parameters for pre-filtering? O365 version of SharePoint has some timeout limitations that cause the SharePoint tool to fail randomly. If I could specify parameters (such as a date minus some number of days or hours on a particular date field) to filter the dataset. Or specify record ID ranges to pull records in batches, this would allow users to work around this issue.

This might be an edge case, but it would be nice to be able to parse a file using a Regex in the Text to Columns Tool, or specifying a delimiter as a Regex:

Consider the following pandas code where one can easily pull in a file with a bad delimiter

In Alteryx, you would be forced to read in the file with no delimiter, and set the field length to be extremely long, and parse out the contents manually.

filename = "http://daniels-pull.universityofdenv.netdna-cdn.com/assets/GeneralOccurrencesAll.csv"

df = pd.read_csv(filename, sep=r',(?!\s)')