Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Idea:

Some well known scoring methods use optimal binned variables for added robustness. Let's add this capability to Alteryx.

 

Retionale:

Here's a basic link on why to do that; http://documents.software.dell.com/statistics/textbook/optimal-binning

 

Current status in Alterys as I'm aware of:

Tile tool or Multi-field Binning tool for completing same task as Tile tool on multiple fields, splits the variables by 5 methods;

• Equal Records or Intervals or Sums

• Smart Tile

• Unique Value 

• Manual

Unfortunately "equal something" binnings are bad idea, as the values are categorized "blindly" irrespective of the effects on the predictive power of the models. 

 

What to do:

What's needed is to bin both numerical and categorical variables optimally such that the Weights of Evidences (WoE) should present a monotone increasing or decreasing pattern. Maybe at most a V or U shaped "convex" structure.

 

Quick win:

Without constraining ourselves with monotonicity or convex cases, the easiest practice would be running a C4.5 or CHAID tree algorithm (produces multiple splits rather than binary splits in CART) for a single variable and select the target as the dependent variable and all the resulting nodes will be the bins we are looking for. Doing this for multiple variables at once is the key to the tool to be generated.

 

Clients:

This capability is sought by risk management departments building robust, stable Basel compliant models in financial industry, especially by banks.

When working with complex modules, it would be great to allow an option to add a tool upstream and automatically rewire to downstreams tools.

Simplified example:

Text Input flows to (1) Filter and (2) Formulae Tool. If I want to drag and drop a Formulae Icon after the text input to be applied to both paths, I can't. I have to either choose To apply to Path (1) or to Path (2).

 

I know that you can right click, press insert after, and search for the tool, but this is not a time efficient manner.  You can also delete the wiring and rewire yourself, but if you have mutliple downstream tools, this is a pain.

 

Its definately not a good UX that the full browse is now in the output window.  I usually have my Output on autohide and its a few extra clicks to see the browses now... Can we have both the Browse Everywhere tab in Output and Configuration Panel?

I recently had an error in a module because an expected variable was not present coming into a formula tool.  My variable, "MONDAY" was not present and the formula MONDAY/3 failed.  The workaround was to union all days into the incoming data and things worked fine.  I would have liked to have an Excel formula like this instead:

 

IF ISERROR([Monday]/3) THEN 0 ELSE [Monday]/3 ENDIF

 

Thanks

At the moment containers either expand and overlap other tools, or you have to leave space for them (defeating the original purpose of using them). Is there a way we can have the containers expansion shift the workflow so the others tools shift down / right to account for this expanision?

Maybe it was a lack of planning, but I've had a need to rename a variable within a workflow and would like to (outside of the XML view) be able to rename the variable so that downstream tools don't have to be reconfigured (e.g. formula, join, union).  

We are starting to use Alteryx as a full ETL DW build tool (and blogging about it too..)

 

Compared to other tools in the market there do not seem to be the usual SCD(slowly changing dimension) and other "standard" tools or templates to start building.

 

It would be great to have a template/Macros/guide to starting to build a DW solution. It is rather daunting starting with a blank page!

 

 

I really like the ability in 10.0 to turn on and off certain tool categories and specific tools within a category to keep your toolbar clean.

 

What would really take it to the next level is allowing users to manage them like bookmarks in a broswer - let me create new custom groups and add anything to them, or move tools among groups.

 

The favorites method lays the foundation for this, but is limited in that everthing is on one group.  Using the method I suggest, users could basically have groups of tools tailored to specific analytic tasks.

Adding sort option to the browser output windows would aid in troubleshooting and in understanding the data at that specific point in the stream better

When bringing data together it is often needed to assign a source to the data.  Generally this happens when you union data and need to know things later about the data for context.  It would save time to generate a source field that is assigned based upon the input connections of the union tool.  Perhaps when unioning data you can assign a name to each input stream?

 

 

I'd like to see Alteryx allow a second install of your license on a second, personal machine.  Tableau allows this and IMO is why there is such a robust online / blog community around that product.

 

For those of us that work at mid-size to large organizations, there are often strict rules governing internal data and use of cloud-based data sources.  If I discover some new trick I'd like the share with my fellow Alteryx analysts outside of my company, I have no clear way to do that the same way I can with Tableau where I can do it at home not using my company's data.

 

Being able to learn new features and test things out on commonly available public data (ever notice that Superstore data set everyone who gets Tableau has?) would accelerate what we're able to do with the community site here and the larger analytics blogging community.

 

 

Currently the Throttle Tool allows control to a number of calls per minute. Some APIs include a limit to the calls per hour and a combination of throttles. I would love to see the option to choose the number of calls per hours and have 2 limit controls (eg 100calls per minute and 100calls per hour)

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? 

I need to consume a web service that uses a “0-legged” OAuth transaction. I contacted Alteryx tech support and found that this was not possible with the current feature set of the Download tool. Please add it.

When a tool's input connector is already attached to a data stream that only accepts a single connection, attempting to attach a 2nd data stream with the same fields should automatically insert a Union tool.  This would be similar to the way an Action tool is automatically added when you connect an Interface tool to another tool.

 

I was recently surprised to find that Alteryx doesn't already havea connector to upload to SFTP sites.  I've managed to work around it with RunCommand and some external programs, but it's very cumbersome.  A simple SFTP upload connector would be a great addition to Alteryx.

I have many use cases that involve one or more of the following:

• moving or renaming a file after importing it
• deleting a file after importing it
• moving or copying a file after successfully exporting it
• writing a temporary file (i.e. batch file for RunCommand tool), then deleting it when finished

A complete suite of file management tools (Copy, Delete, Move/Rename) would make this much easier.

I use detours to bypass areas when I do not need them in the loop and it would be great if i just had a enable button (kind of like how you would control in a macro).  That way i dont have to disable 3 detours but just disable "button."

Same button should work with tool container 'disable' and/or collapse.

At TargetSmart, we create a lot of CSV deliverables for our customers. Since Alteryx differentiates between blank strings and null values (a good thing), the CSV output is not consistent between the two without an explicit multi-field formula step to set all null to empty strings (or vice versa). This is an easy fix for us. However, in some cases we have very large files with thousands of fields and millions of records. For these instances, the workflow run-time is greatly increased by the multi-field formula. If possible, I was wondering if adding a checkbox option to CSV output steps (“Make null/empty consistent” or “Never quote empty/null values”) would possibly be a more efficient approach as the check could be part of the output step (which I assume is native C++) versus the Multi-field formula (which I assume has some level of inefficiency in interpreting the formula dynamically).