Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi, All!

Alteryx' interface is currently in English, but Alteryx' help is available not only in English, but also in French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese.

I would like to suggest there could be a way to select which language help should appear.

As a Brazilian reseller of Alteryx, it would be a great deal to us if I can configure help to be automatically loaded in Brazilian Portuguese.

Currently there is no way of doing this. Alteryx help simply cames in English, there is no choice in here.

Likewise, it would be beneficial to users in France and Germany as well.

During development it seems the syntax checker or whatever process runs behind the scenes after a tool is modified reviews the full workflow. 

Ex - Just from observation if I modify the file name in an output tool I don't see why it would rerun the full syntax check process.

This reduce the time waiting to continue development.

In SQL, obtaining partial sums in a grouped aggregation is as simple as adding "WITH ROLLUP" to the GROUP BY clause.

Could we get a "WITH ROLLUP" checkbox in the Summary Tool's confg panel in order to produce partial sums?

(This was initiated as a question here.)

Here is an example of without rollup vs. with rollup, in SSMS:

(Replacing "NULL" with the phrase "(any)" or some such, and we have a very useful set of partial sums.

Would love for the text areas in the configuration window to allow for a Find/Replace text search. Especially useful if you have long/nested/complex calcs that reference the same field multiple times and then you change that field's name or want to replicate the same formula for another field.

It would be great if we could make use of HTML5, in the same way the new formula tool will, by enabling autocomplete in all relevant tools - Filter, Multi-Row/Multi-Field Formula etc...

Alteryx should really get into the business of having a metadata management tool integrated into the UI.

We recently started training new users with Alteryx, making it more widespread than the few (less than 10) that already had it.  The good and bad of Alteryx is that it really allows us the power to do work we've never done before.  That also means that we've not had to worry too much about resource contention before either.  But with great power comes great responsibility and now we do need to think find a way to manage this power.

There are some good new ideas out there that use the concept of cloud-sourced data governance (specifically, I just checked out Alation).  But why should we have to go to two separate platforms then to examine our data? 

I already know that if I have to spend more time switching back and forth between two platforms to get the same job done with greater care will result in many people taking shortcuts.  Why couldn't this or something like it be integrated into Alteryx?

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

When using horizontal layout the status messages can overlap those of other tools meaning % progress can't be read:

Status labels would be better placed above the tools, not to the right.

I'm curently creating  an app using interface tools to control multiple worklflows.  It would be nice if I didnt have to physically drag the interface tool to the recceiving node.  For example, right now I can click on the Left node of a join tool and it gives me the option to make connections to that tool or out of that tool wireless.  It would be nice if I could right click and have an option to select from a list of interface tool incoming connections.

Ok the time has come to expand functionality in the record ID tool. I would like the ability to restart the counter based on a field (e.g zip code). You can do it quickly in Tableau (see image) so why not have this functionality readily available in Alteryx? Sure, you can already do it in Alteryx - the long way - with the generate rows tool, look at previous/active row with certain condition and do +1 or something like that.

Having a simple restart counter in Record ID tool just makes sense. It's intuitve to have it there, and it's easier to use than generate rows tool. IMHO also easy to develop by Alteryx and +1 for Alteryx in gartner magic quadrant! 

Need to allow Aliases to work with the Google Sheets Input / Output tools, so that I can input API keys in one place to service multiple tools.  I know I can do this via Macros, but I also know it's best practice to avoid nesting macros.

Hi all,

I often feel like workflows can easily become overly cluttered with Browses, especially around Join and other multi-output tools. I need to see the output of most of the data streams, so I can't necessarily just delete the Browses and be done with them (as I'll like need to see them over and over again).

To solve this problem, Alteryx could potentially add a "nested browse" view or tool. I've attached a picture to show what I mean. This would unclutter the area right after multi-output tools significantly.

What are your thoughts? Have I missed any neat trick or functionality that can already do something like this?

Nested Browse View Idea

Frequently with more complicated tool configurations I end up having to setup certain elements over and over again.  Would be great to have a one click "use this as the default" configuration that would follow my profile and apply to all future drags of that tool onto the workflow.  Configuration elements that depend on the input fields would not be impacted.

Also an apply all feature to apply the similar configuration elements to all tools of the same tool type.

Example Configuration Elements

Comment Tool - Shape, Font, text Color, Background Color, Alignment...

Tool Container - Text Color, fill color , border color, transparency, margin

Table Tool - Default Table Settings

Union Tool - "Auto config by name", Actions when fields differ

Data Clensing - all configuration elements

Sample - all configuration elements

Would be extremely useful if the Summarize Tool had an option in the numeric menu to Standardize the data.  More often than not, data sets will not have the same count of variables which makes the comparison analysis meaningless.  Currently, there is no easy way to Standardize the data without using the K-Centroids Cluster Analysis tool or standardize_unit interval supporting macro. 

All the tools in the interface should be populated and assigned/selected with dynamic values.

Now we have the option of populating a set of values for Tree/List/Dropdown.

But we do not have the selecting some of them by default / while its loading.

And Other controls like TextBox/NumericUpDown/CheckBox/RadioButton also should be controlled by values from database.

For example If I have a set of three radio buttons, I should be selecting a radio button based on my database values while the workflow loading.

I'm wondering about migrating from SAS DATA STEP to Alteryx tools and R...

Idea is to parse DATA STEP, replace data loading, preperation, filetring, formula and iterative flows with native Altryx tools and

for the rest, PROC's etc will be replaced by R packages... Wouldn't that be like magic?

If I have a .zip file with multiple files of the same format and layout included, would like to be able to have those read in with 1 input tool.  I also have several large national files split by state that are zipped separately in a folder, so it would be nice to have the ability to use the wildcard functionality in 1 input tool to read all separate files.

We are enjoying the new functionality of pointing to a .zip file in the input data tool and reading in .csv files without having to manually unzip the file.  We process a lot of SQlite files so having that as an option would be great.  We also have several clients that supply .zip flat fixed lenght files with 100+ fields that we have mapped and having the functionality to use the Flat File Layout tool and Import the mapping file that has already been completed would be very helpful also.  The current workaround is to read in as a csv with \0 as the delimiter but we then have to substring to parse each field and rename.

We often build very large Alteryx projects that breakdown large data processing jobs into multiple self contained workflows.

We use CReW Runner tools to automate running the workflows in sequence but it would be nice if Alteryx supported this natively with a new panel for "Projects"

Nice features for Projects could be:

• Set the sequence
• Conditional sequence
• Error handling
• Shared constants
• Shared aliases
• Shared dependencies
• Chained Apps
• Option to pass data between workflows - Input from yxmd Output - no need to persist intermediary data
• Input/output folder/project folder setups for local data sources in dependencies window
• Ability to package like "Export Workflow" for sharing
• Results log the entire project