Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi - I miss the functionality in 9.5 of being able to set a default tool in a tab and then drag in tools from the tab. This seems to be gone in 10. Is there any possibility of it coming back?

Many thanks - Nathalie

Currently only DateTime based functions are available, Time based functions should be introduced. like TimeAdd(), TimeDiff() etc.

This will help users a lot to calculate different aspects of time based calculations...

 

Ashok Bhatt

At the moment, we are not able to use input data field names and its values in Output tool, mainly in the Pre-SQL and Post-SQL statement. I see some discussions on this in the community and in many scenarios we require that. It will be great if we have this option.

There is a web hosted trial that anyone can have a hands on experiance with alteryx tutorials  without even downoading the tool.

That's awesome... http://goo.gl/dpSoe2

 

It may be a nice idea to;

 

1) either start seperate "Alteryx-kaggle" instances with data sets specific to each kaggle competition so that anyone want to try out may have a go with those well known examples thru the Alteryx site, 

2) Or even better have a partnership with kaggle so that anyone can just have it's own Alteryx trial per specific competition on the kaggle website...

 

I'm sure this will draw a lot of attention...

 

Rationale;

You'll immediately have a greater reach in Kaggle community, some data hobbiyists and cs, ie students and acedemics (which will eventually end up doing lot's of data blending when ther are going to be hired by top notch firms...

Idea:

As a method of deploying preprocessing and ML models it would be awesome to be able to convert a workflow to java... 

 

Rationale:

models are needed to be deployed into Complex event processes or decision systems. Even for SAS there is a need to implement the datastep algorithms and procs to run in JVM.

 

 

Quickwin:

It is possible to convert a workflow into a PMML file and then use JMML package to convert that to Java. Yet the full workflow with all preprocessing alternatives and a series of ML methods may not be captured fully.

 

Competitor example:

For SAS case here is a similar solution: http://www.dullesresearch.com/carolina-features/

Idea:

In forecasting and in commercial/sme risk scoring there is a need for trying vast number of algebraic equations which is a very cumbersome prosess. Let's add symbolic regression as a new competitive capability.

 

Rationale:

Summations, ratios, power transforms and all combinations of a like are needed to be tested as new variables for a forecasting or prediction model. Doing this by hand manually is a though and long business... And there is always a possibility for one to skip a valuable combination.

 

 

Symbolic regression is a novel techinique for automatically generating algebraic equations with use of genetic programming, 
In every evolution a variable is selected checked if the equation is discriminatitive of the target variable at hand. In every next step frequently observed variables will be selected more likely.

 

SR comparison with linear regression neural nets and random forests

 

Benefit for clients:

This method produces variables mainly with nonlinear relationships. It is a technique that will help in corporate/commercial/sme risk modelling, such that powerful risk models are generated from a hort list of B/S and P/L based algebraic equations.
There is potential use cases in algorithmic trading as well...

 

There are 3 very interesting world problems solved with symbolic regression here.

A very relevant thesis by sean Wouter is attached as a pdf document for your reading pleasure...

 

R side of things:

I've found Rgp package for genetic programming, here is a link.

 

Competition:

I haven't seen something similar in SAS, SPSS but there is this; http://www.nutonian.com/products/eureqa/

Also there is Bruce Ratner's page

 

Is it possible to add some color coding to the InDB tool.  I am building out models InDB and I end up with a sea of navy blue icons.  Maybe they could generally correspond to the other tools.   For example the summary would be orange.  Etc  Formula Lime Green.

It would be great if I could save a tool and its configuration for future use. I'm sure this could be done now with a macro, and that's possibly how I'll do it.

 

The scenario is that we have numerous data inputs that require some finessing to import. Because the field headers are not in the first row, they aren't recognized accurately as comma delimited. But some of our fields also contain commas within the field, so the solution is to add a multi-field formula to replace things like ", Inc." with " Inc." and ", Ltd." with " Ltd."

 

But on occasion I find new text strings that need to be added to the formula, like ", Inc" (without the period) for instance.

 

I use this replacement technique with several workflows, so it would be great to change it just one time and have the other instances updated automatically.

 

Maybe in addition to our Favorites toolbar we could have a Custom or User toolbar where we could save tools along with their configuration.

Can we move the "Save" disc that's above the tool ribbon to someplace that is not so easily clicked?  Maybe by icons that aren't used as frequently used as the new and open folders are? 

When using ./*.csv for an input (relative path and wildcard), a preview does not show in the Properties area of the input tool.  Can this be added?

It would be great to just have a little tool like a comment box that could be based on whatever you want... like if you always want to see the max date at a certain point, or the grand total. It would be similar to how you can put formulas in the titles in Tableau like "Current as of <MAX(Date)>" or something like that. The best way (I think) would be to have it like the Annotations, but make it so you can turn it on or off at any stage in the workflow (right now annotations are only show or hide all) and make it dynamic based on results from the workflow up to that point. Right now I'm accomplishing this just by using a summary and browse tool, and then I put the result in the title of the toolbox manually.

Sometimes when you make changes to a filter tool or some other tool's configuration and immediately click on another tool on your workflow, the chanegs you made to your first tool won't register.  The only way to get them to register is if you click the canvas afterwards.

When scoring data if you have values in predictor fields not seen in the data that was used to build the model the score tool will not score the record.  Makes sense but it would be nice to know how impactful the issue is.  Please provide a count of records not scored for these reasons as well as a count of records not scored because of exceeding the limit in the configuration tab of the score tool. and a count for any other reason a record is not scored so we have a clear understanding of how many were scored and how many were not and why.


 

While trying to debug data parsing, I end up with browse tools all over the place and it makes the pallet a mess and time consuming to organize.

It would be much nicer to just have a little corner of all icons to have a sub icon or something I can click on to see output.  Multi output could be a little more tricky ... so better yet, maybe have small browse icons on the connectors you can click on for results of that feed?

Then have a menu option to turn all off/on.

I have the Show Properties Window selected, but it is not showing up on my screen. At first I thought it was just hidden and that I could just pull it back from being hidden, but I can't find it anywhere. 

Thanks! 

Like the ability to create data tables for reporting purposes, makes life a lot easier.  I would like to suggest the ability to be able to define the height of each row in the table.  There is a lot of wasted space between the rows and becomes challenging when you are trying to work with getting everything on one page or keeping the table contained within a box on the report.

I would love to have alteryx dump the excess amount of records on a new sheet in the same excel file that the user creates for dumping the output.

Problem: When you configure fields manually in the union control and then go back to remove a field it throws up an error that "XYZ field missing"
Solution: One needs to change the config to "arrange fields by name" then refresh before you can arrange fields manually

I would like this problem to be handled by some method that tracks for changes and warns the user rather than throw an error.

Correct me if I am wrong, when I use the trade area tool, the only non-spatial data appended to my input dataset is the RadiusSize field. Can this be expanded to include the Units selected (km, miles or minutes) and the dataset used for drive time, plus AreaSqMi, etc? Values like 10 in my RadiusSize field are useful but I would like to have all Trade Area details.

Actually, could you incorporate trade area tool into the spatial match tool since these tools are usually used one after the other?

Bedankt!