Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Could we please have the option of selecting the fields, like the join tool, within the Calgary Join tool?  It is especially problematic when I simply want to assign spatial object name to a point; i.e customers within a DMA or sales territory.

This would be agreat addition within the ConsumeView Matching tool as well.

  Thanks!

With more people moving into urban developments, it would be helpful to allow analysts to measure customers within a "walking distance". Similar to drive time analysis, a step up would be to incorporate "walk time" analysis.

I´ve looked in the forums, and the idea is new. It would be great if there would be an option to make it possible to give tooltips when writing a formular yourself not only in the "basis-language of the installation", but also in e.g. english (as Lingua Franca). The reasoning: in Excel or Tableau I know many a command in only one language - and have to undergo a timeconsuming process of A) thinking AND B) looking it up in the language you have to use at that project.

Even Tableau does not offer this - and you have to create a lot of  calculated fields. Alteryx could gain in UI-friendliness...

I´ve looked in the forums, and the idea is new, although it has similarities to others. Since Alteryx already supports Crtl+c and Crtl+v - why not support "F4" as well. In ALL MS-Office programs it repeats the last step and thus eases the burden on mouse and user...

I realize that repeating a whole process might (!) not be feasible - but single steps (e.g. "Formatting to the similar size like the last item....") would already be very helpful.

Since Tableau does not offer this - and it has a lot more to format and repeat - Alteryx could gain in UI-friendliness...

Idea: Allow the user to set the data type including character field width in the Text Input tool.

The Text Input tool currently auto-senses the correct type and width of the field in a Text Input tool. However, this sometimes restricts the usage of the data downline.

Examples:

1 - I often run into the situation where I've copied some data from a browse tool and then pasted that as an input to a new workflow. Then I'll turn that workflow into a macro. But then I run into an issue where the data that comes into the macro is larger than the original width in the Text Input tool. This causes problems.

2 - The tool senses that a field containing zip codes should be numeric and then converts the data. This corrupts the data and makes me insert a Select/Formula tool combo to pad the zeros to the left.

It's really great that you guys have such clear communication about updates to the third party data, like CASS. 

But, would you consider sending out those update emails to just the contact person for an organization?

We are trying to keep all of our users in sync on the same versions of CASS and US Data; and the email blasts have caused some confusion.  Not to mention too that our IT security policy is to not download zips/exe's from the web.  We have a centralized way to bring it in, prep the download, and make available all at once to keep everyone up to date.

As detailed in How-To-Create-an-Optional-Field-for-an-Analytic-App, when using the "Generate Field Map for Input Data Tool" option in the File Browse tool, you can easily specify a field as "optional" by adding "(Optional)" to the field name in the input template. However, when you do this, it no longer automatically matches field names in the selected file unless those field names also include "(Optional)" in the field name. It would be very helpful to the user experience if the tool matched the name of the field prior to the "(Optional)" text with the fields in the selected file.

For example, if you include the field "Address (Optional)" in the input template file, and you select a file which has a field named "Address," that field is not automatically selected as a matching field. The user must manually match that field. "Address (Optional)" should automatically match "Address" if it exists. But, of course, if it does not exist, it would not match and it would remain optional.

Would be great to see a 'built-in' select on the input tool.

Appreciate you can do this when connecting to dbs but nearly every time I (and I believe most others) use the input tool to connect to a file, the next tool I use is a select tool to rename/remove/change type of the incoming data.

If there was a select tool 'built-in' to the input tool (as the mocked-up image below shows) it would offer three key benefits:

1) quicker for the user

2) cleaner workflow view (especially in workflows with multiple input tools, each subsequently followed by select tools)

3) more intuitive for new users - after all, they are the future of the Alteryx community 🙂

File Input Select

It will be nice to have a tool which can salce/standardize/Normalize a variable or set of variables to a selected range eg. (0 to 1) ( 0 to pi ) (-1 to 1) etc.. or user specified range.

Althoug its possilbe to do it using fomula tool which include creating new summary variables and several steps -  I think its worth to have it as a tool given the whole philosophy of alteryx is to keep it easy and quick.

The option to "Disable all tools that Write Output" is great during testing but I often need to toggle back and forth and its location on the Runtime tab of the Workflow Config is inconvenient.

I think it would be great to have a button for that on the toolbar with the added feature that it would visually display whether the feature is on or off (so you don't need to see an Output Data tool to determine the current status)

Can we get a more robust read.Alteryx function for mode="data.frame"?   If it is reading the stream as a data frame, can we have the option  stringsAsFactors = FALSE?

I am getting tripped up a lot because the code will execute in R Studio, but will get mysterious behaviours when it runs within the R Tool.   I am manually converting variables to character strings in my R Tool code which I don't have to do in R Studio.   However, I'm not a highly detail oriented R developer, so I will miss variable data type conversions and have spent a lot of time going down the wrong path.  Also, It makes it difficult to maintain two different scripts for the same routine.

I have started using the glimpse() function in R Tool code, to help catch some data conversions since it writes the output in the message log.  

Rob Campanell

It would be good to expose the column metadata (data types) of HIVE tables when viewed using the "Select In-DB" tool, similar to the standard select tool.

As a consumer of hive table from alteryx via the In-DB tools, it adds value to understand the semantics (atleast the field types to start with) of the hive table from alteryx.

Regards,

Sandeep.

Wild card read option (Sales_*.csv ) works for reading files of the same structure available on a standard windows network/local fileshare. It would be good to have the same feature for reading from HDFS via the HDFS connection option using the input tool.

Regards,

Sandeep.

When you select a tool you get a nice little outline that calls out that you have in fact selected that tool. When you select a comment, you have to look at your configuration to see which comment you have clicked on. It seems silly to have to actually read something in another part of the screen in order to know you've clicked on the proper thing. 

In the Output Data tool, when the file type is YXDB, one of the options is to Save Source & Description.

Splitting these into "Save Source" and "Save Description" -- independent options -- would be useful.

Sometimes I don't want the file recipient to know how a field was derived but I want to include a description.

Right now there is no easy way of doing this.

It was great to find the DateTimeTrim function when trying to identify future periods in my data set.

It would be even better if in addition to the "firstofmonth" , "lastofmonth" there could be "firstofyear", "lastofyear" functionality that would find for instance Jan, 1 xxxx plus one second and Jan, 1 xxxx minus one second. (Dec, 31 xxxx 12:58:59) respectively.

I'm not sure if time down to the second would even be needed but down to the day period.

DTT menu

It would be nice to be able to set a default date for the Date Interface tool.

Props to @KaneG for the workaround ( http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Set-Default-Date-for-Date-Interface-Tool/m-p/3573... But I'd like to see something built in to the tool rather than use a workaround every time as the standard.  Plus, I enjoy the uniform look of having two date inputs.

Just as a side note while we're on the topic of the Date Interface tool; it is really misleading the way "Today" stays outlined even after you click on a different date.  I always second guess if it took my click or not.

Hi,

I recently started to take online trainings on Alteryx and came across Tile Tool. Though could understand the purpose to some extent, it would be great if the tool is explained in more depth along with more examples and also how the tile number is calculated for the examples.

Thanks,

Saipriya.

Whenever I add an interface tool, it adds a constant just like the 4 engine constants and any user constants. It would be useful if tools like the formula and filter automatically added question constants to the list for you to use. This would be identical to how user constants behave currently. Here is the before and after for visual effect:

BEFORE:

AFTER: