Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx has proven very useful in connecting to and processing data in local Cloudera HDFS cluster.  However, like most companies we are moving much of our processing/storage to a cloud environment like AWS and Azure.  A typical security setting is to have this data encrypted within HDFS.  Unfortunately Alteryx does not support this environment.  This could quickly force us to look for different platforms to use unless Alteryx can evolve to support this.

Thank you to @LeahK for suggesting that this should be a separate idea (cc @JulieH; @TaraM, @LeahK, @JoeM😞

The lack of home use / learning editions of Alteryx is a serious mid-term competitive threat factor for Alteryx - and it's well worth both this Alteryx community; and the Alteryx Community Management team making this a key priority for the Alteryx platform.

Rationale:

The BI/Data science space is very competitive (as evidenced by the recent Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrants), and although Alteryx was given very favourable review in some factors - there were serious concerns about licensing costs; and time to productivity.

Clearly - Alterxy succeeds in direct proportion to the size of the active user base - so the question is "How do we increase the licensed / deployed user base" and I believe that there are 3 factors which all relate to the issue of learning-edition alteryx licenses.

a) Time to productivity:   Right now - I cannot ask one of my staff to learn Alteryx at home and prove their capability before paying several thousand dollars to give them a license.   Once I give them a license; it then takes them 2-3 months to become productive, and we run the lottery of finding out whether this person was a good fit for this kind of role in the first place.   Solution:  Make Alteryx available in a learning edition at home with a robust certification program; and a learning progression built in - that way I can tell my staff "I will give you a license once you demonstrate your competence by learning to this level".   How does this help Alteryx: lower time to productivity = more attractive product

b) Size of committed user base:  As tech professionals - we take our tech bias with us to our new role (the "Affinity effect"), and often will have some leverage in tool selection.   The more people know Alteryx and are invested in their Alterxy skill set - the greater this "Affinity effect" will start to show in sales figures.   This also makes the tool more sticky, reducing the defector population if users can see and use latest features at home.

Solution: Give the learning edition away for free - Pentaho spoon is currently free for learning; as is Tableau Public; and MS Power BI is incredibly cheap to learn.   If Alteryx doesn't do this - others definitely will anyway, and this "Affinity Effect" will be washed out.

c) Increase the skill pool in the market:  The more wide-spread the skills are - the more likely I am to purchase a toolset.  So - if Alteryx skills are very broadly available in the market - it's easier to make the purchase decision for Alteryx rather than competitors.   However - right now the skillset growth is severely constrained, so Alteryx is making the "Buy Alteryx" decision needlessly harder.   

Solution: Make Alteryx available for training; learning; & Certification for free.   

Note: Although this is directly contrary to my personal interests in the short term (the smaller the number of people with skillX, the higher the market value), it is also long-term selfish because I will be able to increase the impact within my firm by having access to a greater pool of skilled and instantly productive workers in the market.

Although price may be an issue - this is a separate matter.   I believe that Alteryx can do a lot to create future sales pipeline, and a committed and very sticky user base by providing this home-learning & certification program.   In my mind - this is probably one of the biggest competitive opportunities & threats facing Alteryx right now, given the velocity of this particular industry & segment.

I'd be very happy to talk this through in detail with the Alteryx team if that's helpful (just PM me)

Many thanks

Sean

I am bringing this over from this post.

It would be really cool to have a workflow that you could configure to your server that we could schedule to pull down the new Cass updates and install them. Since they have to be reinstalled every two months, it would help to manage that.

I think that the data updates are set up with an FTP site, Cass could be done essentially the same way. Download it there and then use the command module to run the install? I may be over simplifying the process but it seems like this is something that Alteryx could tackle.

I want to use Alteryx to pull data from a SharePoint List.  This shouldn't be a problem, but I use SharePoint Content Types.  Alteryx won't allow me to import any list that has Content Types enabled; thus rendering the SP list input type not usable. 

My interim workaround is to create a data connection thru excel to the list and then pull the data in that way, but optimally, I would like to pull directly from the list.

Content types are a best practice in SharePoint, so any list or library in my site collection contains them.

Please update the SharePoint list input to support content types.

thank you,

Someone else inquired about this but I didn't see an idea entered /

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/SharePoint-List-Input-Problems-importing-content-types...

Hi, I'm becoming a heavy user of the Documentation Tools known as containers and comments. However, I am currently finding it tedious that I have to alter their settings individually or alternatively have to copy and paste a container or comment that has the formatting I want to replicate the formatting of.

I would like to be able to document the containers and comments quickly and then assess how each of them will be assigned colour and fonts to make the readability of the End to End workflow easier. I find in the Microsoft Office products the copy formatting paint brush is really good for this, it would be great if Alteryx could offer a similar function. 

It's not a world changer in terms of functionality but it would improve the user experience and the speed at which I could produce a tidy ETL workflow using Alteryx. 

Would like to use arrows and other shapes for documentation. Moreover, having "anchors" (i.e., like in a wiki) would really facilitate moving about large workflows. I imagine the former is not hard to implement, though uncertain about the latter.

Check out the mock-up workflow for an admittedly bad example.

Debug mode is fantastic, but it is a pain to navigate to it through interface designer. I suggest a shortcut button next to the 'run as app' button on the top toolbar.

When working in a large workflow wireless connections help to make it easier to work with. However sometimes you want to be able to see all your connections (when debugging). 

I'd like to see a toggle (button on the toolbar) which would display all the connections including wireless. Ideally the wireless connections would be a different color. You could then click the button again to make the the wireless connections invisible.

Reason:

The existing options to display are limited as you have to click on individual tools to see the connections. 

Currently I have to load data from an Eloqua instance. Unfortunately, there is no connector (apart from a third party connector). Eloqua has a a bulk API to export data. Extracting data involves several steps of GETs and POSTs which would be nice to have it done in one connector module.

My system's regional settings are German that uses a different decimal symbol and digit grouping than an English system.

Frequently I need to copy data from a browse tool in Alteryx to Excel to create a quick chart or further analysis; this often includes float or double data types.
Instead of the in my case correct ',' as decimal symbol, Alteryx uses the English '.', hence would cause incorrectly pasted values in Excel.
Always using an Excel file as output data is time consuming.

The request is: Make Floats and Double aware of the systems regional setting for copy and paste out of results.

I have a column called Recency that only has values from 1 to 5. When I view the data using the Browse tool I see a scatter graph of the data that tells me very little apart from the fact that they only have values from 1 to 5. It would be much more useful to display a histogram showing how many records have 1,2 etc so I get a better idea of the data quality.

Currently if I enter a long text using the Text Input Tool (for example when posting data using XML) it's impossible to see what's in the entire field since the horizontal scrolling immediately jumps to the next field instead of smoothly scrolling the (long) first field. I have to edit the data in Notepad and then paste back into Alteryx to fix.

I would love to have the ability to easily populate an entire schema of tables into my work space without having to perform repetitive connections to individual tables. 

Ideally, this would include the ability to drag a schema onto the workflow and have all of the connection tools auto-populate.

I often have  a need to investigate data in many tables to verify its presence / validate the table contents. This would be a very helpful feature for completing this easily and completely.

Thank you!

Cisco, which has been building enterprise networks, and is literally close to the Internet of Things, is creating some data products, perhaps a platform, perhaps a suite, to handle big data. Part of their offering is DNA Data Virtualization (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/dna-virtualization/index.html). Compare Cisco at 75,000 employees to SAS at 15,000. 

As the subject header says, I would like the Data Cleansing tool to incorporate a way for the user to explicitly specify characters that should be removed.

A very common task that should exist in this tool, removing the need for writing formulas and cluttering the workflow with additional tools.

I love the new Custom Format option with the DateTime tool in Alteryx 11.0, this makes working with dates SO MUCH easier... BUT it would be great if you could update an existing field rather than having to create a new column (e.g. DateTime_Out) and then use a select to put this back to the original Date field.

Issue:

Currently there is no "In - Database" node to perform action queries

Work around

Use of the pre / post SQL in "Output data" node to perform action queries

Impact

Alteryx ease of use of "In - Database" nodes to work on large scale databases

Currently use of Knmie and SSIS is preferred instead of Alteryx

Action Requested

Please add an action query node to "In - Database" group.

Background:

Teradata is a high performance database system.  It is highly sensitive to indexes and balancing the records across each index segment.

Teradata uses Spool to perform queries on the database.  It is also very sensitive to type of table (volatile, temp, permanent) created.

Issue:

Alteryx "In - Database" nodes are not providing the ability to configure them to Teradata needs.

As a result, when executing workflows with "In - Database" nodes there is high probability of "out of spool" error specially when working on medium size data base (between 250 million to 1 billion records).

Impact:

Question mark on the ability of Alteryx to handle medium to large databases.

Knime and SSIS are currently preferred to Alteryx

Action Requested

Please change the configuration of the "In - Database" nodes to allow fine tuning of the node behaviour.

It would be great if Alteryx could better handle Carriage Returns!  If I have a csv file that has Carriage Returns (\r) in the Description field Alteryx displays it like so in the browse tool:

I’m ok that it’s ignoring the carriage returns entirely to better display the data, but the problem is that there is no way to know by looking at this browse tool that there are “hidden” carriage returns in my data. When we try to copy this to excel and it looks like this:

Unfortunately, this isn’t quite how I was expecting it to look. I think there are three related changes I would like to see:

1) Change the copy feature of the browse tool so that it ignores carriage returns (\r) just like when you display it in a browse tool.

2) Make a new character that would display the carriage return when I click the “show whitespaces” button. It shows line feeds (\n) as paragraph symbols but won’t show carriage returns (\r). Here is what the \n looks like if I replace my \r with \n:

My \r character currently doesn’t display at all:

3) Add the red triangle indicator similar to the line feed (\n):

I currently get no warning that there are embedded carriage returns.

Thanks!