Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Good afternoon,

If any one of you have had to create Column Rules in the Table Tool for multiple Table Tools you'll know how much of a pain it is to set the same rules over and over and over.

It would be an amazing addition if we had the functionality to copy column rules to apply to other Table Tools.

What are yalls thoughts?

-Nick

Example1

Hi,

I was just working on an application that targets a back end database, which is currently manually refreshed.  A user on my side requested that we include a "Data Last Refreshed on" text on the application, so that users would see it whenever they ran the app.

I was able to accomplish this by using a Drop Down tool populated using the "External Source" List Values, which is not connected to any Action tool.  However, this is a somewhat ugly solution to the problem - it creates one more clickable object for the user that doesn't actually do anything.

I think having a "Label" tool, which functioned similar to a Text Box (multiline support) but did not allow users to enter values, that included the "External Source" option from the List Box/Drop Down, would be a huge help for Application Development.  This would let you create a configurable message for your users, be it a Last Refresh, runtime instructions, or even a Last Run Date for the application.

When we open any workflow, its becomes very difficult to understand from which gallery I have opened the workflow(s). Could you please do something, so that once the mouse pointer gets move into the workflow tab in designer, it will display the corresponding path as well.

In Excel we have the option of adding icons based on conditional formatting (example 1). It would be amazing if Alteryx had something similar (Example 2).

What are yall's thoughts?

-Nick

PS. the idea label tool doesn't work very well

Example1

Example2

There are some minor tools like Twitter Search (http://www.alteryx.com/resources/blending-social-media-data-without-it) and Grazitti's Facebook Page crawler...

But we need tools for accessing and blending more of the existing semi-structure social data,

• no YouTube connector to search between videos and track impressions yet...
  
• no LinkedIn connector to crawl public and full profiles (with permission) to do HR analytics yet...
• no Instagram connector yet, to crawl marketing data and do trends and competition search
• no Flickr connector to grab pictures to do Image search and recognition...

Top social media sites Updated February 1, 2017;

1 | Facebook 1,100,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors
2 | YouTube 1,000,000,000

3 | Twitter 310,000,000

4 | LinkedIn 255,000,000
5 | Pinterest 250,000,000

6 | Google Plus+  120,000,000

7 | Tumblr 110,000,000

8 | Instagram100,000,000
9 | Reddit 85,000,000

10 | VK 80,000,000

11 | Flickr 65,000,000

12 | Vine 42,000,000
13 | Meetup 40,000,000

14 | Ask.fm 37,000,000

15 | ClassMates 15,000,000

The ability to limit the number of records (either on a specific input tool, or via the Workflow Properties) is super useful when developing a workflow...

...but how many times do you forget that a record limit was set and then spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out why something isn't working properly? (I can't be the only person this has happened to...).

Wouldn't it be fantastic if a warning/message was shown in the workflow results (e.g. "Input Tool (n) has a record limit set"
or "Record Limits are set on the Workflow Properties")?

Right now, I have to do a little voodoo to get a user to select a sheet within an excel doc to use as a source.  My use case is that I have an excel file provided by other users in which the relevant data could be in one of many excel sheets, and there isn't a good programmatic way to determine the right sheet.  Thus, I want to prompt my user to select the sheet when running an analytic app.

I have to start with a file browse option to prompt the user for the excel:

From here, the prompt will only ask for a file:

At no point will it prompt for the sheet it wants within the file.  And the action options don't give you the ability to change the sheet (it reads it from the file input after the pipe):

To solve this, I have to create a app that only prompts for the excel sheet and then set it to output the sheet names.  From there, I do a little formula magic to split it into key-value pairs with the value being the entire file path pipe concatenated with the sheet name, save it to a file, then read the file in a second workflow which presents the sheet names in drop downs.  It looks something like this:

This all seems unnecessarily complex given Alteryx seems to have already figured this out in designer:

My idea:  Use the same file selector in the "Input Data" tool for the File Browser when setting the File value from an Action.  It would save me from having a separate workflow just to prompt a user for an excel sheet.

Thanks!

As part of our documentation process, we'd like to save the documented image of the Alteryx workflow to a OneNote project folder. However, the image quality of the Print->Send to OneNote option is too low to capture many of our processes.

It would really help the project documentation process if we could increase the image resolution of the output image so that the workflow can be zoomed in to and seen clearly. I think this could be achieved by either enabling larger paper sizes in the Page Setup, or by giving the ability to increase the DPI of the outputted image.

I would love to see Alteryx add an indicator whenever a number being displayed is being truncated. For example, this picture is currently confusing:

The displayed numbers should all be equal according to their displayed value, but in reality a different number is being stored in the background. I would propose something like this:

1) Any number that is being truncated when displayed would have that red triangle in the upper right corner. This already happens when a formula tool result is truncated, but I would like for it to be displayed on all data.

2) Clicking on the cell would show the actual value, not the truncated value. This would be great when debugging.

I understand that numbers are more complex than meets the eye, and I think that changes like this would help alleviate some of the mystery (like why 2 of my numbers above aren't equal).

Hi ,

Price Elasiticity is an important topic in Retail Business. I have browsed over the net trying to find an optimal methodology to calculate Elasticity mainly in a retail Setting, where we have Point of Sale, Transactional data.

Can we develop a tool for the same?

Currently, when choosing the "<List Of Sheet Names>" options for excel files, Alteryx always does an implicit sort of the sheets when outputting the list.  For some of my excel files I need to read, the order of the sheets in the excel is important.  But Alteryx will always perform a sort, without me being able to know what the original order was.  And yes, one of those fun situations where I don't control the excel sheet.

It would be nice when selecting this option to either preserve the order of the sheets or somehow include an additional column that numbers the order the sheet was in.

It would be nice to have the option to overlay multiple addresses to find  marketing opportunities within the heatmap. Currently I have to map the addresses elsewhere and click back and forth between tabs to see where they lay within the chosen variables.

When running Alteryx using parallels we were unable to start a CSV file on a specific line (greater than 1).

Message:  Attempted to skip more lines than in file.  Please check the import line.

The filename includes a UNC path.  We attempted to modify the workflow dependency to be relative (all options were tried).  Alteryx could not/did not change the path as when using parallels the directory is always UNC.

This problem was posted in the discussions and I'm entering it here in ideas for remediation.

Cheers,

Mark

One of the tools that I use the most is the SELECT tool because I normally get large data sets with fields that I won't be using for a specific analysis or with fields that need re-naming. In the same way, sometimes Alteryx will mark a field in a different type than the one I need (e.g. date field as string). That's when the SELECT comes in handy.

However, often times when dealing with multiple sources and having many SELECT tools on your canvas can make the workflow look a little "crowded". Not to mention adding extra tools that will need later explanation when presenting/sharing your canvas with others. That is why my suggestion is to give the CONNECTION tool "more power" by offering some of the functionality found in the SELECT tool.

For instance, if one of the most used features of the SELECT tool is to choose the fields that will move through the workflow, then may be we can make that feature available in the CONNECTION tool. Similarly, if one of the most used features (by Alteryx users) is to re-name fields or change the field type, then may be we can make that available in the CONNECTION tool as well.

At the end, developers can benefit from speeding up workflow development processes and end-users will benefit by having cleaner workflows presented to them, which always help to get the message across.

What do you guys think? Any of you feel the same? Leave your comments below.

It would be great if we could have a Windows Active Directory data connector tool added to the standard Alteryx toolset.

MS Excel Power Query and PowerBI both can connect to Active Directory for use as a data source, but are both very cumbersome to use.  Having a connector in Alteryx that can read AD data into a workflow would be super helpful for a long list of use cases.  A couple that are top of mind for me are:

-Leveraging group membership info for dynamic distribution of reports or datasets

-Being able to build reporting and dashboards about the organization (useful for Tech audit, HR, etc.) 

I've seen links to an old project on GitHub of someone that started development on this, but the method (just copy these random .dlls into your program directory) is seriously frowned upon by any enterpise IT.  Would be great if Alteryx could pick up that work, polish it a bit and add it to the actual Alteryx Designer toolset.

 Hi!

I opened up WorkflowA and WorkflowB.  Later, I went to Windows Explorer, and clicked open WorkflowA, because I wanted to make another change in it.  Not realizing that it was already open, I inadvertently forked WorkflowA into two versions.

It is desireable to be able to open a workflow twice.  Say, I made several changes and wanted to compare that to the original. However, it would be nice if Alteryx produced a warning saying that the workflow has already been opened.  In my case, WorkflowA was pretty complicated, and I don't know if I "un-forked" the workflow correctly.  A notice would have prevented this scenario, which has happened to me multiple times.

Thank you,

Joe Kelly

I was trying to download zipped text files from Amazon S3 Bucket using Amazon S3 Download Tool.

Unfortunately the tool allows you to choose between csv, dbf and yxdb files and there is no option to select Zipped Text.

It will be very useful if this feature can be provided as most of files available on S3 are large files and are generelly in Zipped format.

I love the dynamic rename tool because quite often my headers are in the first row of data in a text file (or sometimes, Excel!).

However, whenever I open a workflow, I have to run the workflow first in order to make the rest of the workflow aware of the field names that I've mapped in the dynamic rename tool, and to clear out missing fields from downstream tools. When a workflow takes a while to run, this is a cumbersome step.

Alteryx Designer should be aware of the field names downstream from the dynamic rename tool, and make them available in the workflow for use downstream as soon as they are added (or when the workflow is initially opened without having been run first).