Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for a bug report, but I just solved one that has been bugging me for ages. Of the six key commands to hide and reveal the various panels, only five work, and now I know why.

Apparently the 'Results' panel used to be the 'Output' panel? I found some outdated docs that mentioned Crtl + Alt + O to open/hide the Output panel. Sure enough, the reason Ctrl + Alt + R doesn't work in the current version is that, in spite of what the menu text says, it's O that is still mapped to that panel, and not R.

I only discovered this after making sure none of my other installed apps were stealing that key combination. Thank you, process of elimination.

Enable multiple sheet selection for excel

I would like to be able to connect to an AWS EMR resource.

And an AWS gov cloud endpoint.

Hello Team,

I have been using Alteryx for sometime now. The final output of any kind be it analytics or simple Excel outputs is expected to have some basic formatting.

A minimum of 3 Tools and humongous effort is need to format even basic headers and Cells with a border and color.

Using Table followed by Render and then column level setting for having borders for the set of data is little time consuming considering it has 0 impact on the actual data output.

Additionally Render tool to Excel will be in number format regardless of the data type. Same is the case for date fields.

Also the Render tool Layout changes impact the data as well as the column lengths adversely.

Can we have some simple option of overwriting a file where the formatted excel is merely overwritten with data without changing the datatype or format out the excel sheet.

It would be huge win if this is easily do-able wither via a new tool or as an option in the output tool.

While doing Find replace with the following settings,

The output limits to the number of characters comes with "Replace source". If the number of characters in "Replace  Found Text With Value" is more than the source then it will truncate the value to source. I feel it's not correct. 

Suggesting, that there should be an option to overwrite the "field size" or keep as it coming from source.

A lot of business processes require encryption and decryption, for either data transfer or authentication processes.  It would be great if Alteryx could expose some of the C# encryption functions from the System.Security.Cryptography library, as either functions in the Formula tool, or as new tools. 

I know that some of these algorithms require byte input, so a new tool might be the sensible option, so that user can pass various data types that are pre-coded to byte arrays before going into the algorithms.

I get the following message when running a macro with the Render tool inside

" Alteryx ppt testing1 (162) Tool #26: You have found a bug. Replicate, then let us know. We shall fix it soon."

I believe this happens when there is multiple line breaks next to each other and trying to put this into the render tool outputting to powerpoint within a table.I have the formula for updating the line breaks "Replace([Layout],"&lt;br /&gt;","<br />")" which works when there aren't very many line breaks but now I have integrated Python to regex out HTML the Render tool has stopped working

When using Dynamic Input with databases, the Database may be returning errors or other information that the tool cannot parse into a dataset.

It would be great if we could see the 'raw' response from the database somehow, as this might provide insight into why we are not getting the expected results. 

If the tool could output an optional error column that has the unparsed response from the database server, it might allow us to debug the problem ourselves. 

If the returned data is actually a string response from the database, but one that is flawed in some way, we might still be able to parse data out of it to 'ride over' the error.

Field selection in Multi-Field Formula seems to be 'All' or 'All of a Type' or, potentially, lots of manual tagging.  I have >600 fields and want to select about 150 adjacent fields.  Is it possible to implement a 'mass select' option within the Multi-Field Formula Tool, as found in other tools?

Configuration window - Add feature to zoom in or out of the configuration window similar to the canvas.  There is alot going on in the Configuration window and it would be helpful (especially for those of us with eyesight challenges) to be able to zoom in/out similar to the Canvas. 

More and more people are making use of Plotly and Plotly Express to develop really great graphics.  However it is extremely difficult to extract either interactive charts (HTML format) or static images (PNG or JPEG).

The main issue for Plotly to save static images is the ability to install and use Orca (application) for R and kaleido (library) for Python.  Despite my best efforts I have had no luck getting either approach to work with the respective Alteryx environments

Migrate old R based charts and create new statistical charts in the interactive chart tool to provide enhanced statistical charting and visual data exploration capabilities.

This includes:

• Error Bars
• Distribution Plots
• 2D Histograms
• Scatterplot Matrix
• Facet & Trellis Plots
• Tree Plots
• Violin Plots
• Heatmaps
• Log Plots
• Parallel Coordinates Plot

This these URLs for more examples:

https://plotly.com/python/statistical-charts/

https://plotly.com/python/scientific-charts/

The ability to create, modify and enhance interactive chart types through custom plotly code in either R or Python.  This would allow new style of visualisation to be created and shared with other authors.

needs a much simpler way to configure this tool. Its way more obfuscated than it needs to be and the wording on the config is very confusing.

For heavy workflows (e.g. reading massive amount of data, processing it and storing large datasets through in db tools in Cloudera), a random error is sometime generated:  'General error: Unexpected exception has been caught'

This seems due to Kerberos ticket expiration and the related setting may not be modifiable by the Alteryx developer 'especially when GPO). Suggestion is to enhance the indb tools in such a way that they are able to automatically renew the Kerberos ticket like other applications do.

Br, Lookman

Map input allows the user to connect the Q anchor to a file browse in order to navigate for a Reference Layer.

Please allow functionality for the tree input tool to do this as well.

Thanks!

Hello All,

During my trial of assisted modelling, I've enjoyed how well guided the process is, however, I've come across one area for improvement that would help those (including myself) overcome any hurdles when getting started.

When I ran my first model, I was presented with an error stating that certain fields had classes in the validation dataset that were not present in the Training dataset.

Upon investigation (and the Alteryx Community!) I discovered that this was due to a step in the One Hot Encoding tool.

Basically, the Default setting is for all fields to be set to error under the step for dealing with values not present in the training dataset, but there is an option to ignore these scenarios.

My suggestion:

Add an additional step to Assisted Modelling that gives the user the option to Ignore / Error as they see fit.

If this were to be implemented then it would remove the only barrier I could find in Assisted Modelling.

Hope this is useful and happy to provide further context / details if needed.

Issue

Im troubleshooting a workflow with around 4,400 tools, breaking into separate workflows, and leveraging the crew macros to run the workflow sequence.  Well- I changed a few file names and have an interesting disaster where I need to go tool by tool to verify everything is properly configured.  

Solution

I used tool containers to group and label sections of tools to be organized, but it was becoming difficult to navigate the ocean of tool clusters.  So- I used blank comment boxes in the tool containers.  If everything works in the container, I made the comment box green.  If something is broken, I made it red.  From there, I made all of the red comment boxes green to make sure everything was diligently reviewed.  

New Cool Idea

Troubleshooting mode- make it easy to flip a lighthouse switch on the tool containers.  Colors are great for categories, but this makes it easy to focus or highlight containers with maybe a cool retro looking switch. 

Peace, Love, and Workflows....

Salesforce Input tool throws a conversion error if labels are longer than 40 characters:

Could the the size of the field be increased to whatever the the Salesforce maximum is, or at least be configurable from the tool configuration. 

Particularly annoying is that the conversion error cannot be ignored (as seen in the Union tool) but will continue to show the result as yellow in the Scheduler. We like to keep a green board!