Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be great if Alteryx developed an option to keep data transformations and additions already ran through the module. After adding new tools to the module, then the module would keep all of the data already transformed or added up to that point and would only spend time running the data through any new tools added after that point.

It would save the analyst a lot of time when developing big and complex modules.

Hello,

It would be great if there was an option to compute 'median' on numerical data column in 'cross-tab' tool. We trust 'median' a lot more than 'average' in many different computations.
I would stretch my suggestion far enough to propose adding quantile computations as well...

Thanks!

Hi Alteryx Team,

My work is to create Output from Alteryx and upload the Output file into Tibco Spotfire. So i want a system in which Alteryx output directly goes in to the Tibco Spotfire and update Tibco Spotfire in every 6 hours.
So do you have any plan to connect the Alteryx with Tibco Spotfire? This is will help me to automate the project.
If not pls think on these concept for future use.

Dear Alteryx Team,

Dynamic Input Tool is a great tool to import easily multiple files using files paths parameters ... having the same tool for outputs would be great to export many files in pre-established folder.

Many thanks

Arno

It appears that the Marketo Input tool only is focused aroudn getting Lead oriented Objects, however since Marketo is a Marketing Automation tool, it has many more objects such as email performance, landing page performance, web activity, program performance, revenue explorer, etc. 

I'd like to vote up this idea of having marketo input connector having access to extrac data from other objects outside leads. 

Here is the latest Marketo Analytics resources that are available.  Anybody else encounter this bottleneck when trying to source the data out of Alteryx? 

On the “Multi-Field Formula” tool, the default is to “copy output fields and Add….”  I think the default should NOT copy. I’m using this tool to trim all of the blank spaces, and change the case in text fields. I often forget to uncheck it and end up with all these additional fields at the end. With regard to the tool container, I think the default margin should be small. I build huge workflows, and putting each section in a tool container. I have to go in and change each one to small margins to condense the workspace. Perhaps in the user settings, under document, there could be a default margin option, just as there is a container color option.

I would be great to have a json-stat parser. There are probably ways of doing it with the JSON parser but it is appears to be a little bit tricky.
Also, it would be nice to be able to use a json-file as input in a simple manner.

We have several .txt input files (same structure) that need to be combined into one file.  But all the files have summary information on the first 6 rows.  Alteryx help me created a macro to skip the first x rows but it is involved - but it works.  Having a "start data import on line x" would greatly simplify the process.

When I setup an In-DB connection I need a way to select only the tables I want to see. Basically a way to favorite the most frequenently used tables and also the ability to add a description of the information that resides in that table. Use Case: Because we have so many irrelevant tables with no data dictionary in some of our databases this would save a ton of time to narrow down the tables I can select right off the bat.

It would be very helpful if Alteryx allowed us to manually configure the IP and port number of a web proxy in instances when we are accessing online services. 

Currently we are limited to chossing one of two layout direction options, vertical or horizontal.  Why not make the direction assignable at the tool icon instead of as a module level control.  I could right click the tool and have layout direction as an option which would activate a visual handle which could either allow infinite rotation control or rotation control in 45 degree increments.  You can use Viso as an example of rotational control for a shape.  In Visio the shape rotates, in our case since we are really looking to change the flow direction the icon could remain in the same orientation as it does now but the conenctor point(s) would rotate around the compass in say 45% increments base on the drag of the rotation handle that appears

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.


 

I haven’t found a common spatial file format to use between Alteryx, MapInfo Pro and ArcMap.  The one file/db type that all 3 software packages have the ability to use is SQLite.  Problem is that each of these GIS packages stores data differently in SQLite. 
I propose the following…  Alteryx should have 2 new SQLite options to save output (and read from) in SQLite-ESRI and SQLite-MapInfo.  This does not get us to the holy grail of one common file format but does get us down to 2.  (If you guys could figure out 1 common format that would be better)

Having these new SQLite formats would fix a common issue shared by the Alteryx supported ESRI and MapInfo formats, namely 2G file limits, multiple files per dataset and short field names.  Currently, to save an output for ESRI and Mapinfo, I take a single yxdb and save multiple shape or tab files.  The conversion back is an aggregation of individual files into an yxdb.  SQLite, as a database, has the ability to store many tables which further reduces files (much like a file geodatabase).

Finally, I have been begging for Alteryx to have the ability to read and write to an ESRI file geodatabase, which seems to never come to fruition.  This SQLite solution would eliminate my need to write out to file geodatabases.
 

One of those small little annoyances that can add some extra time to development is how when you browse for a file (either with the Input Tool or Output Tool) it always defaults to the most recent location of where you either picked up a file or output a file.

Many times I have existing Input Tools or Output Tools that I simply need to repoint (meaning they already have a file location mapped to either read or write to.)  For these, it would be great if, when the user clicked to File Browse, the initial folder location displayed was the same folder where the current file is mapped to. 

Perhaps displaying the most recent folder in the file browse interface may be best suited for when a file has not been mapped yet.

We have a number of clients now using Exasol databases and they would like to connect Alteryx to this data source.  There is currently some difficulty connecting using Alteryx and so it would be good if this could be fully tested please.

I have several regular outputs I use that are in both Excel and PDF (depending on who I am sending them to).

The format of these is always:

For Excel, create a summary sheet and set as the first tab, then create detailed sheets as additional tabs in the same .xlsx file.
The summary sheet always has the same fields, but the fields may reference different detail tabs day to day.

After the output, I can manually open Excel and change the field to a formula that references the other tabs (hyperlink function).
It would be great if I could just type the hyperlink formula in Alteryx and have that embedded into the Excel output.

The same goes for PDFs, except I would reference other pages (or if using PDF portfolio I would reference other PDFs in the same portfolio).

We would like to have the ability to overwrite sheets in macro-enabled Excel workbooks.  Several of our scorecarding templates leverage macros for Excel events, protection, and interaction, and the ability to directly overwrite data in these workbooks would be a huge benefit of  using Alteryx.

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.

Posting on behalf of Door To Door Organics:

Canvases can get pretty huge and it's an unintuitive pain to have to scroll and shift+scroll across a large canvas, and an even bigger pain to rely on the sliders at the edges of the canvas. It would be REALLY nice if we could navigate the canvas by dragging the canvas around, much like a touch interface, in the same way that Photoshop's "Hand Tool" works. 
 
As an added plus, the same hotkey that Photoshop uses (the spacebar) should also be usable in Designer, since, I'm pretty sure it's not used for anything else at the moment, as a hotkey. The functionality would look like this: hold down the spacebar (which changes the mouse cursor to a hand tool) and then, while the space bar is still held down, you'd be able to "grab" the canvas and drag it around in your view port in order to traverse it in a much more intuitive way. Bonus points if you could manage to implement some inertial scrolling with this as well. 😃