Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently, Alteryx can connect to FileMaker via an ODBC connection, and for the most part, it works great. The only issue I've hit thus far is when importing data with foreign text in it - Arabic and Cyrillic text specifically – sometimes the data comes in correctly, and sometimes it’s turned into garbage characters. I’m not sure how widely used FileMaker is, but the full support for it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

~Chrispy

Would be great if when copying and pasting tools onto the canvas they would appear next to the cursor, instead of near where they are being copied from. On large workflows it's annoying to copy the tool/s, paste, then drag to their new location.

With the allowance of personal use coming I would love to see Alterxy create a free 'Community Edition'. In my mind this would be a free version of Alteryx (similar to the Tableau Public App) with a few key limitations to the product, such as only allowed to connect to a local file, no download tool, only output to local files can only save to the gallery etc. 

This would mean people who cant access Alteryx through work (or can't afford to purchase it for themselves) can learn, develop and share. It also means that when a user comes to deliver a POC they have a bit more experience than just the 14day trial period

Please add the ability to specify indexes when creating a table with the Write Data In-DB tool.

When running Teradata SQL using the Connect In-DB tool I need to create a table on the database using the Write Data In-DB tool and do numerous updates before bringing the data to the PC.  Currently there is no way to create a unique primary index (or any other index) when the Write Data In-DB tool creates a table.  This causes Teradata to consume huge amounts of wasted space.  Today I created a table with 160 columns and 50K rows.  This consumed over 20 Gigabytes of data with 19.7 Gigabytes of wasted space.  In Teradata the way to control wasted space(skew) is by properly defining the index which can't be done today.

Hi,

I'm not sure if it's just my computers (I've tried on a desktop & laptop), but Alteryx doesn't seem to have the "select all" ability in the input/output windows. Meaning if there is text already in the output window, the user should be able to click once to drop the cursor, click twice to select the whole word, and click three times to select the whole line. Currently, it just goes does the first two.

Since I usually have long file paths, I can't see the whole path, so instead of just clicking 3 times to select everything, I have to click once to get the cursor there, then hit the Home button, then hold down Shift and hit the End button, then do my copy/paste. I think having the 3 click select all basic function would be very useful. Have a great day!

I setup a generic template because the excel files do not have a consistent schema.   This is the template

which is interpreted as text

When I feed files into the dynamic input tool the output configuration is

This is the schema of the first file read by the DI tool.  Why didn't it use the template?

The requirement to have all the schemas match is difficult - especially with excel.

I would like to suggest the input tool have a checkbox to override the data driver and interpret all columns as text.

Read excel as text

https://www.connectionstrings.com/ace-oledb-12-0/treating-data-as-text/

I was trying to check the correctness of multiple URLs with the help of download tool connected to parsing tool that way I check the download status and filter the records to good and bad based on the HTTP status codes. To my suprise it allows 2 errors at the maximum ans stops checking next records which is not at all useful for me. I wondered if someone can help me. As @JordanB say it is the default behavior of the tool and can't be handled as of now. Hope you guys have the error handling feature in your next release. 

Saketh 

I was with my friends at Limited Brands yesterday and they pointed out to me a way to improve Alteryx.  While designing a workflow, each time you add an input tool to the canvas you literally have to start from scratch to add additional tables from either a db datasource or file source (e.g. access).  With other tools, you can drag multiple tables to the canvas at once and come back later and add more inputs without having to select your source, see a list of tables etcetera.

On their behalf (they may post another suggestion), I am posting this idea.

Thanks,

Mark

When testing I often need to check single (or a handful of numbers) throughout the workflow. I have to click on each browse to check the numbers. A tool that rendered the output of multiple fields throughout the workflow would allow me to check if I was dropping any rows or miscalculating at a glance.

For instance if at the beginning of a workflow the row count was 15,951 and the cohort size was 328. Also the sum of profit for the cohort was £1,934,402 and the count of sales was 1,584. Remember those? Not if you have to click on the browse tool multiple times all the way through a large workflow to make sure you keep these figures intact. Copying out into excel or popping out the data from browse are the only options, each fiddly when trying to alter things quickly.

A resizable output window such as the explorer window would uber-useful.

Thanks

It'd be nice if there was a way to add an autofill function.  Say I was using a text tool and got tired of always typing the full name in (lazy, I know) or just didn't know the correct spelling.  It'd be nice if there was a check box where the app creator could allow for autofill or autoselect.  As the user typed in the text a drop down list would show changing as he user typed until the user saw what they were going to fully type.  They would then select that text from the drop down list.  Be a nice little feature.

The Legacy Excel output Driver has the ability to Delete Data & Append as an output option for Excel files.  This is useful to retain custom formatting and conditional formatting on a worksheet.

However, the new Excel Output Driver and Macro-Enabled Excel Driver do not have this option.

I think this would be very helpful for a lot of our business needs, as we still use Excel for a lot of our reporting needs.  I know that Tableau is a very powerful tool for exactly this sort of situation, but we do not yet have any widespread adoption at our company.

Particularly, conditional formatting would be a fantastic option, as it would save a lot of post-run manual process.

I think it would be incredibly helpful for Alteryx to include a "Fuzzy Join" operator, similar to what is described in this article: http://www.decisivedata.net/blog/alteryx-fuzzy-join-workflow/

Virtually every client/project I work on, there is a nead to clean up data.  Most of the time, that involved standardizing to some existing list of data.  However, as we all know, data from differnet systems or being manually collected will not match perfectly in all cases.  This is most often when I tend to use the Fuzzy Match tool.

However, I have to use a lot of weird steps to effectively create a "Fuzzy Join", which is something I've done using database functions in the past.  I think it would be great if a new tool were created that would do the following:

• Accept two inputs, one for the "raw" data and another for the "list" of data to match to.
• Perform a fuzzy join based on similar functionality to the fuzzy match, convert data to metaphone keys and then run Jaro/Levenstein matches.  By default, return only the highest matching result.
• Expand the pre-process functionality to include words to exclude from the analysis (beyond just "and", "the" and "in").  
• Match on the whole string.  No need to try and do joins based on partial words within a string.

This seems like a very common thing (I've created a macro for this anyway) that could be made to be simpler for everyday use.

Thanks!

If a user selects 10 Input tools, the ability to then right click and be able to "Insert After" to a Union tool and have all the Inputs attach to the Union would be great!

I'm converting some old macros that were built in 8.6 for use in 10.6 and found something that could potentially be changed about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. Specifically this refers to the field types passed from a Dynamic Input tool when the data fields are blank when using an .xlsx file as the data source template. 

When the new .xlsx file has fields populated, it works fine. If data is not populated in the new file, the field types are converted to Double[8]. This doesn’t cause a problem for the Dynamic Input, but it can cause problems for downstream tools. In the second case below, the field names are retained but the downstream Join tool errors when trying to join this now double field to a string (rather than returning no results from the join output as desired). This also occurs when a single field is empty, only that field will be converted to a Double[8] field. When the legacy .xlsx drivers are used, the field types are retained from the data source template.

File Source Template vs. file that is returned upon running

There are other solutions for this scenario such as using a Select tool with a loaded .yxft file of the correct field types, or selecting the Legacy .xlsx drivers from the File Format dropdown when configuring the Dynamic Input. However I thought this is something that could be improved about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. 

It would be cool if, in the API, we could get at all data fields for the relevant dataset, without having to manually list them in the Expression builder area.  Example: if we had a formula function called "AllFields()" that returns all fields.  Then, supposing we had a huge data set with hundreds of fields, we could do something like Average(AllFields()) in order to average all of the fields without listing them individually.

And I know, the multi-field formula is there also, but it would still be handy to have this, especially in conjunction with the API, where I'd like to be able to write methods that cruise all data fields to do this or that.  Thanks!

I've had to look through a few logs recently and I had expected the information to match with what is displayed in the results window

Reference the tool name, type of tool (in/out, prep, etc).   Only the toolid shows up in the log where the results window shows the name

I'm loving the ability to read from a zip file! However, I would love the ability to read all file types. For me, I don't see .accdb or .flat, and I assume other folks might be missing other file formats that they use. I find it confusing that the input tool accepts a lot of file types, but selecting the zip format then limits my choices. I believe @Aguisande mentioned this issue in the 10.5 beta.

Thanks!

Running into an issue when typing from keyboard to make a selection in some dropdown lists found in tool configurations. I've replicated it in the Join, Join Multiple, and Filter tools. (Sort tool worked as expected.)  Running version 10.6.

• Join tool configuration.
• From "Left" dropdown start typing to select a column.
• Click off the "Left" dropdown (into "Right" for example).
• Notice that your selection in "Left" is maintained.
• Now click on another tool or in the cavas.
• Click back to the Join tool. Notice that the "Left" selection has reverted to the original field and your typed selection is lost.
• Note: you can "commit" your selection by hitting "Enter" after typing, but I don't think this extra step should be required (as evidenced by the Sort tool).

This small mis-step can have SIGNIFICANT impact if a developer assumes their join field selection was set correctly, but in fact it changed without them noticing and is resulting in incorrect joins.

See attached video for quick walkthrough.

Hi everyone,

Could it be possible to have alteryx being able to encrypt/decrypt files or data by using external keys. I believe it could be useful to have it handle AES and/or RSA encryption...

What do you think?

Julien