Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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

It would be nice to be able to search "Variables", "Functions", "Saved Expressions" within the expression boxes of tool configurations, instead of having to fiddle with the hierarchical tree structure all the time!

It would be great if it were possible in future to adjustment Analytic App buttons.

For example Run instead of Finish or so... and so on!?!

Best regards

Mathias

I would love to see a "Product" option added to the summarize tool. I can currently count, sum, mean etc., but I can't multiply my data while grouping. There are numerous "work arounds", but a native product function built into the summarize tool would be great.

Thanks for listening!

While manually entering expresssions in tools say for example Formula tool, if an error occurs, apart from the error definition displayed below, there must be auto correct options available depending upon alteryx interpretation. It must provide suggestions to rectify the error in the expression.

Such functionality is present in other softwares and it would be great if alteryx add this too.

I know a ton of users who have noticed that the Select tool no longer shows the entire Column name anymore. It used to automatically show the majority of all column names (unless they were really really long) but now it only shows about the first 9-10 characters? Why is this? Can we go back to old format? I noticed that the Field part of the display now shows the entire name (V_String, etc), but this is really not needed as you can tell the field types usually by the first 3-4 characters, why did that get enlarged and the column name part got shrunk?

Also, why is Description even there, how many people actually use that field on a regular basis. Why can't that be shortened or taken away entirely and the extra space be given back to the Column name area? Also, why when I go thru and adjust the width manually of the display, does it revert back to the compact view the next time I click on the very same tool? We should at least have options to keep it the way it was, having to constantly drag out the name field every time I click on a Select tool, or Spatial Match tool, or any other tool with the select tool interface is really annoying and time consuming, it was much better/easier the way it used to be.

Does Alteryx have something similar to change.org, where we can petition for a review on that update?

Please give the ability to use formulas when using the "Manually set values" option in the Drop down tool.

Screenshot below shows an example:

In trying to work with varying content and rules for extracting information, the regex tool requires a literal string.

The functions can accept a workflow parameter but I needed to parse out the results.

For now, I have only a few patterns but looking to handle a more general case.  Thanks

It would be nice to have the expression box (found in formula tools etc.) and the join selection (found on joins etc.) as interface tools.

With the Action Tool, if you use the "Update Value" action type, you have the ability to check the "Replace a specific string" option

If you use the "Update Value with Formula" action type, you no longer have the option to Replace a specific string.

Can't think of any reason why we should not have the ability to replace a specific string while using "Update value with formula"

Please can you add this in next release?