Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The behavior of an "Overwrite Sheet (Drop)" configuration is such that it breaks formulas (#REF) that point to the overwritten sheet and named ranges that reference the overwritten sheet.  This is a bummer because the only way I've found to overcome the issue is to write a script that re-applies the named range.  This works, but it greatly raises the barrier to using this tool and in some corporate environments it won't even be possible.

What would probably be a good alternative behavior is to delete the contents of the sheet, rather than the rows/columns/cells of the sheet.  I think both probably have valid use cases but my proposed functionality is going to cause fewer issues and be the more popular behavior for most users.  I believe there is a google sheets API call for just this kind of behavior...

Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

We are a large company with tens of thousands employees using Salesforce on a daily basis. Over the years, we have worked with Salesforce to make many customizations and create many reports to provide data for various reporting needs. However, we have increasingly found it inefficient and prone to error to download the reports manually. We have many teams using the Salesforce reports as a base to create additional business insights.

Alteryx is a great tool to manage data ETL and workflows, but it does not support pulling data from Salesforce reports directly. Instead, it only offers connectors to pull data from base Salesforce objects. The data from Salesforce objects such as tables can be useful, but do not necessarily offer the logical view of Salesforce reports, and may require a lot of efforts to reconcile the data consistency against the reports our users are used to. Sometimes, it may be impossible to repeat producing the same data from Salesforce tables as those from Salesforce reports. That in turn would cause a lot of efforts spent by the reporting teams, their audience, and users of the Salesforce reports to match things up.

Salesforce does not have any out-of-box solution to schedule downloading the reports. At our request, their support team did some research and have not found a good 3rd-party solution in the Salesforce App Exchange ecosystem that supports this need.

I strongly believe this is a great opportunity for Alteryx. Salesforce already has an API that allows for building custom applications to pull Salesforce reports. However, most Salesforce users are more business oriented and do not necessarily have the appetite to engage with their IT staff or external resources provide to develop such apps and bear the burden to main them.

I have attached the Salesforce Reports and Dashboards API Developer Guide for your reference.

Sincerely,

Vincent Wang

The overview window is useful with large workflows. Clicking once centers the workflow on the desired location. I think it would be great if you could double click and it would center on that location as well as zoom to the "Normal" zoom level. Quite often when working with large workflows you are zoomed out and it would be helpful to quickly be able to go to a section of the workflow and automatically be at a level where you can see the the connection progress (without having to zoom in enough times to see it.)

Occasionally, the Calgary Loader tool will not write out all fields passed to it.  This seems to happen after writing out a certain number of fields then later, when rerunning, adding a new output field.  Very annoying because you don't know it will happen until processing is complete and you examine the result.  I usually manually delete the calgary files prior to rerunning, to avoid the versioning, but it still happens.

Also, please make the versioning optional with a check box, default off.

I'm using Alteryx with an Hadoop Cluster, so I'm using lots of In-DB tools to build my workflows using Simba Hive ODBC Driver.

My Hadoop administrator set some king of default properties in order to share the power of the cluster to many people.

But some intensive workflow request need to override some properties. For instance, I must adjust the size of the TEZ container in setting specific values for hive.tez.container.size and hive.tez.java.opts.

A work-arround is to set those properties in the server side properties panel in ODBC Administrator but if I have many different configuration, I will have a lot of ODBC datasource which is not the ideal.

If I could directly set those properties in the Connect In-DB tool, it would be nice.

We've been researching snowflake and are eager to try this new cloud database tool but are holding off till Alteryx supports in-database tools for that environment.  I know it's a fairly new service and there probably aren't tons of users, but it seems like a perfect fit since it's fully SQL complaint and is a truely native clouad, SAAS tool.  It's built from scratch for AWS, and claims to be faster and cheaper.

Snowflake for data storage, Alteryx for loading and processing, Tableau for visualization - the perfect trio, no?

Has anyone had experience/feedback with snowflake?  I know it supports ODBC so we could do basic connections with Alteryx, but the real key would obviously be enabling in-database functionality so we could take advantage of the computation power of the snowflake.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the topic and find out if it's in the plans or not.

Thanks,

Daniel

A problem that recently came up for us was the need to be able to build an application, called App A, that would launch App B and its set of choices under one set of logical circumstances, launch App C and its set of choices under a second set of logical circumstances, etc.  After working with our Alteryx rep and trying to use the Run Command object to launch the apps from the command line (which caused a licensing issue error), we've been told that this is not something that is currently possible in Alteryx.  We were wondering if it would be possible to get functionality like this in a future edition of Alteryx.

Right now we can only change the alteryx log folder but not the log file name. If we can change the log file name , it will be great because that gives us the ability to parse certain logs and check for errors/issues and send out emails accordingly.

It would be nice to have the option of reassigning the Tool ID's based on each tool's process order within the workflow.

Hello,

I work with alteryx databases a lot to store some historical data so I don't have to pull it in the future. It would be great if there was a way when creating the database, where I could lock them for editing and can only be edited by select usernames and passwords.

Thanks,

Chris

Looking forward for the addition of in-database tools for SybaseIQ or SAP IQ

Please star that idea so Alteryx product management can prioritize this request accordingly...

Note on SAPIQ;

• SAP IQ is a database server optimized for analytics/BI, it is a columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics
• IQ is very good for ad-hoc queries that would be difficult to optimize in a legacy transactional RDBMS...
• It's ranked number 48th amongst all DBMS and 27th amongst relational DBMS
• SAP IQ16 has gained R language support

currently we can connect with ODBC, http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/sap-sybase-iq-ODBC/m-p/9716/highlight/true#M700

I would like to see either the option to create a Venn Diaram within the current chart tool or an entirely new tool specifically for Venn Diagrams.

I often work with data from multiple sources and would like to better understand how much of my data is in multiple sources and how much is only from a single source. A great way to view this is with a Venn Diagram.

Please add the ability to interface with Oracle Siebel CRM. Preferably, this would be a built-in connector similiar to the SFDC Connector.

Hi All,

I think it would be good to have the ability to pick a connection and drag and reconnect that to another tool.

Following are some of the areas where it might come handy

1) In case a tool is there which is having good number of connections and we want to move all connections to a new tool.
In current scenario, I end up deleting my existing connections and then re-establishing those to the new tool.

2) In case there is an existing connection which is separated by a good distance on the canvas and we need to move one side of the connection to a tool near to the existing tool.

At the moment, I am making use of select tool to save me some effort for above cases, in case of scenarios calling for reconnection, I generally put a dummy select tool and reconnect existing connections to select and then delete the existing connection from tool(to select tool) and repoint connection from new tool to the select.

Thanks,
Rohit

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.

I find this page very helpful to understand how each tool works:  Alteryx Tools

It would be really great if Alteryx also provides a working example for each tool. For an effective hands-on experience....!!

Hello,

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

Thanks,

John.

I think it should be done ASAP.

Hope this is fairly self-explanatory.

I'd like to be able to create presets for Summarize tool.  Instead of having Group By, Sum, Count, Count Non Null, etc on top of the libraries of functions, put them into their own category.  Users could then create a Favorites and the functions that they use the most would be stored in that section (editable by user).