Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Sometimes I just want to see the tool names without the annotations. Currently the options are Hide, Show, Show with Tool Names, but there doesn't seem to be a way to just see Tool Names without annotations.

Sometime I use the save button within the browse tool to save a copy of the data. This does not work if you wish to overwrite an existing file though.

For example if I have a Tableau extract called mydata.tde and then using the browse tool I save the data and try to overwrite this file I am asked if I want to replace this file and on choosing 'Yes' Alteryx tries to save the data but then shows me an error about 'duplicate table name'. It should simply replace the file with the new data.

When working with large amount of data the browse tool profiling causes the program to stop responding.

A feature to disable the profiling per browse tool.

or even better

After a set threshold (e.g. amount of rows), the auto profiling is disabled and requires an action to run.

While exporting a report to Excel via the Table/Layout/Render tools, it would be helpful to have the ability to manually adjust the size of specific columns within the report table.

Currently, Alteryx auto-corrects the column widths based on the data in the columns and the selected paper size, even if you select specific column widths using the Table tool. This is a great feature for reporting, however in my use-case my output report contains two blank columns which will be manually edited by my team. Because these two "manual update" columns are blank in Alteryx, the column widths on the output are quite small compared to the other columns, and this will require manual column width formatting within the Excel sheet to both accommodate the (often lengthy) manual updates that will be entered into these two columns, and to keep the report within the paper size parameters.

Thanks!

Taryn

I work for a company that is still running v 10.5. It takes some time for us to go through acceptance testing / approval for new versions of software, and therefore we will only upgrade to version 11 in November at the earliest.  At the moment there is a warning just above the workflow stating that a newer version of Alteryx designer is available, which decreases the size of the workflow canvas etc. There is a dropdown to to defer this warning for a period of time (90 days/1 year etc), but this appears to make no difference as the warning shows on every startup of Alteryx. It would be great for this warning to be removed/the deferral to actually work as it becomes old pretty quickly when I have to remove this warning on every startup.

Thanks!

Given the prevalence of XML - it seems that it's worth adding a native XML capability to Alterxy (similar to the discussion with @CharleyMcGee and  @KaneG in the discussion forum).    Currently XML is treated mostly like a big and oddly behaved text field, which really undermines the usefulness of XML in real applications.

What I'm thinking is:

- Add in a component, which acts like a join, but what it does is validates an XML file vs. an XSD file so that you can see if your XML file matches the schema definition.   Tremendously useful if you've ever had to hand-craft XML.

- Add in a native data-type for XML (like you have a data-type for Centroids)

- On this XML data type - you can then do interesting things like walk the document object model, or iterate through all children (which fixes the issue of deeply nested XML being such a pain).     This would bring XML parsing into the level of usefulness that programmers in Java & Visual Studio have enjoyed for years

- Finally - an ability to construct XML data files without having to text-hack this.   i.e. something similar to the transpose tool, where for a given node, you can add children etc.

These four things would really really assist with getting Alteryx to be able to deal with modern data sets like JSON; XML and even web-page scrubbing.

As always - very happy to commit time to helping shape this - please feel free to reach out if that would be useful.

Thank you all

Sean

CC: @JoeM; @mceleavey; @MarqueeCrew; @NeilR; @Ned; @dawid_nawrot; @TaraM; @GeneR

It would be good to replicate some of the key workflow configuration settings as shortcut icons in the main shortcut toolbar.

For instance, I often use 'Disable all tools that write output' and need to toggle it on/off quickly when I'm testing a workflow. It takes too many clicks to deselect a tool, open workflow configuration, open the Runtime tab and select the checkbox. Many end-users I work with also don't even know the option is there because it is so well-hidden.

It would be much simpler and easier If I could toggle it straight from the shortcut bar. Having a keyboard shortcut to do it, like I do with ctrl-R (to run) would be even better.

Having shortcuts would also be good for:

• Disable all browse tools
• Show/Hide connection progress
• Open the Events window

I am frequently using comments within my containers to tell an engaging story to my business Audience about the workflow I have built. However, whenever I start adding, removing, moving tools etc within containers these comments don't remain static within the relative position of the container and drift into positions that I have to manually adjust. 

From a time saving perspective it would be great if I could:

1. fix the position of comment within a container and

2. Group comments in a way similar to how you can group objects in Visio and Photoshop

How I use comments in Alteryx

My company uses a network drive to store our macros and macro packs (like CReW). This way, all our designers can add the directory to the Macros tab in their User Settings and have the macros available to them instantly. We use macros more than many of the standard tools, so we add them to our Favorites toolbar. However, if we are working in Alteryx offline (not connected to our network), Alteryx can't find the macros. That's expected and totally okay......but when we reconnect to the network, Alteryx doesn't add the macros back to our Favorites. I would appreciate if Alteryx could make the Favorites smart enough to "remember" the file path of the macros that should be there so it can search for them each time Alteryx loads and show them if we are connected to the network.

While I strongly support the S3 upload and download connectors, the development of AWS Athena has changed the game for us. Please consider opening up an official support of Athena compute on S3 like support already show for Teradata, Hadoop Hive, MS SQL, and other database types.

Two additions to the formula tool that would be great to see:

- When I select a function (like DateTimeParse) and hit F1 for help - please could you take me to the help for this specific function?

- For the parameters which are ordinal or "magic value" type parameters - please can you create a simple formula builder so that we don't have to keep on going into the help text to find out which % flag to use for a month in MM format; and which is MMM format.

     - What I'm thinking here is a simple pop-up box that allows you to create the parameter you want

     - Alternatively - provide a direct hint-text for the parameter in question or inline intellitext like Visual Studio or Eclipse

     - Overall though - the date functions seem to have grown up at different times - and so they treat dates in different ways - dateTimeDiff uses "Hours" which is pretty common, the DateTimeParse uses magic values like "%Y", and the new date time conversion tool uses the standard form used in Windows of MM-YYYY etc.   So it woudl be worth looking at a refactoring of the date functions to bring them all to a standard treatment of date parameters.

Thank you

Sean

Dear Alteryx,

You know the thing I used most in the old Formula tool? The "Operators" section under "Formulas" that reminded me of Alteryx's particular syntax for things you can use in formulas but that aren't formulas themselves. (I switch between Alteryx, Tableau and Excel for writing formulas, and they all have slightly different rules for this stuff - having a quick syntax reference right where I needed it in Alteryx was SO HANDY!!.) There is no operators section in the new "fx" section. Please add it in. As it is, I've taken to opening a second instance of Alteryx with nothing but a loose filter tool so I can look at the operators section there when I'm trying to use the new formulas tool in my working instance. This is not ideal.

Thank you!

Using Ctrl + F in Alteryx is a quick and easy way to find various things in a module including tools and keywords. One drawback to this feature is that, after you type Ctrl + F, the cursor does not automatically go to the Find Text: text box in the window that appears. Many times I have typed Ctrl + F followed directly by my search word, as I am accustomed to doing in many other applications such as Adobe, Word, Excel, Google Chrome, etc., but Alteryx does nothing. This minor inconvenience slightly decreases the efficiency at which I am able to navigate Alteryx modules, and would be a great enhancement for the future.

Ever since Alteryx 11 came out, the way dates and DateTimes are handled and computed changed from v10.  Formulas that I had working before no longer work.  The single biggest culprit I tend to see for this problem is that Alteryx 11 no longer seems to be able to intelligently compare Date and DateTime formats.  This is kind of annoying because it forces me to run a DateTime function on all my Date fields for doing comparisons.

For example, I have a formula that I use to calculate if a date is the beginning of the month.  That formula is:

IF DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date],"month") = [Snapshot Date]
THEN 1
ELSE 0
ENDIF

Where in the above, Snapshot Date is a date field with data incoming in a format like "2017-01-01".

In Alteryx 10, this formula returned as expected, true.  However, in Alteryx 11, it returns false.  When I dove into this a bit more, I noted that DateTimeTrim will always return a DateTime format, so the formula is attempting to compare "2017-01-01 00:00:00" to "2017-01-01".  For some reason, Alteryx now doesn't think this comparison will result to true.

To address this, I now have to do:

IF DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date],"month") = DateTimeTrim([Snapshot Date], "day")
THEN 1
ELSE 0
ENDIF

My suggestion: Let comparisons between Date and DateTime formats work with the assumption that any Date field is as of midnight that day.  In the example above, Alteryx would implicitly assume that "2017-01-01" is "2017-01-01 00:00:00" for any comparisons to DateTime, like it did in the past.

More and more applications in R are written with tidyverse code using tidy data principles.  According to rdocumentation.org, tidyverse packages are some of the most downloaded.  Adding this package to the default offering will make it easier to transfer existing R code to Alteryx!

Alteryx is brilliant at handling dates and understands them natively. Very often businesses want to analyse money, and in all sorts of ways. In Alteryx if a column contains $123.45 Alteryx thinks it is a string, and one then has to mess around converting it to a number. Alteryx should recognise that anything like $123.45 or €123 or £1,234,567 is actually money and is a number not a string. This could be achieved either by  having a money datatype (like MS Access) or if that is too hard, a function that converts a string version of money into a number irrespective of padding, commas or decimal points.

Regards

Mark

The object name is too long in NFD/NFC when connected to Teradata Error occurs when you use SQL comments above the SELECT statement within the Connect In-DB customer query box. Once the comments are removed the problem is resolved. It would be great if the Connect In-DB tool could recognise comments as what they are. 

Has anyone tried to build a flow that goes from right to left?

If possible, it would be very helpful if the Schedule Workflow window that a user activates to schedule a workflow on the server showed which version is currently running on the server. This will help avoid the version incompatibility issues when a user has upgraded to a higher version than is currently running on the server. Also, for companies that have just started using a server and all the version control processes and guidelines and not yet in place this would be very helpful. Thanks for the consideration.