Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently, in order to change the header and data justification to CENTER, one has to select the "Column Rules" button for each column configuration. In a large report (25+ columns), that means selecting each time. It would be more efficient to have the header justification in the Default Table Settings style editor. There is already a setting for font, font size, bold or itallic, text color and background color. I have never created a report for someone where they did not want the headers centered. The workaround is to only feed one column through, then to change the column rules for that column and the Cynamic or Unknown Fields. This works fine, but when I have a report that creates an Excel workbook with 5+ tabs, it gets annoying. It's even more time consuming when I have a report tab, that I need to create sub headings for, so there are multiple report tools for one Excel tab.

I find it a little strange that we need to utilize a different set of tools (the In-DB tools) in order to achieve push-down optimization. This is not the case, for instance (as far as I know), in SPSS, perhaps others.

My request is to automatically push logic to the database layer if and when it's possible to do so.

In order to maintain operation similar to existing, it could be implemented as an overall workflow setting (on or off) such that leaving it turned off would result in tools continuing to behave as they do today.  Turning it on simply enacts a process of combining as many tools as possible into SQL that is pushed to the database server, and assumes whatever permissions are necessary to make that happen; (e.g. ability to write temp tables or etc...)

Thanks!

I am currently using alteryx to generate pdf reports and noticed there is no option to have multiple row headers. In my line of work i cant skip this as the end users insist on having it like they have always had it.

I definitely think this should be available as many of us like replicate canned reports which are otherwise in excel and hence see the need for such an option.

The following might give an example of the multi row header,

Also the ability to merge certain columns to create the above effect should be available.

We regularly copy and paste SQL code from MS SQL Server Management Studio into the SQL Editor in the Input Data tool in Alteryx Designer. We normally format our code using tabs for indentation to make it clear and easier to read. However, these tabs trigger an error similar to: "Error opening table: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0: Incorrect syntax near 'FROM'.\42000 = 102".

This code runs perfectly in Managment Studio. When I delete the tabs, the code works, but is much more difficult to read. It is generally standard in SQL editors that tab characters are considered "white space," along with spaces and CRLF.

Please allow tabs in the SQL Editor.

I will be using TS Model Factory tool for running ARIMA quite extensivelty and understand that existing tool does not allow for model customization options. I will really appreciate if we can have customization options which helps to specify order of AR or MA components like it can be done in ARIMA tool.

Thanks!

As I'm sure many users do, we schedule our workflows to run during non-business hours -- overnight and over the weekend. Our primary datasource (input tool) is a remotely hosted database that our organization doesn't maintain (and hence cannot monitor the status of). If the database were to timeout or if our query were to overload it's resources, our scheduled Alteryx workflow would (attempt to) continue to run for an unknown amout of time. We would like the ability to cancel a scheduled workflow if it has been running for a certain amount of time in order to prevent this.

The Text Box tool has a tickbox allowing a multi line "answer" to be supplied for the question.

But it does not allow you to easily setup the question as multi line i.e. with carriage returns

Please allow the ability to enter multi line text for the Question of the Text Box Tool.

At the moment, I force carriage returns to happen, by entering a bunch of space characters in the "Enter the text or question to be displayed" box of of the "Text Box" tool. This is obviously not ideal.

Example of desired layout for App question:

example showing how entering a bunch of spaces can be used to force a carriage return:

Could you please add a second/separate opacity setting for polygons?  Many times I'd like to have a solid border around a trade area, but with about a 50% opacity setting for the fill.

Thanks!

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.