Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Can you add an ExceptionHandler to the Tile Tool? The tool crashed on a large dataset.  I got an Error: Tile (1): No values found before GetMean() on the tile tool. I selected Smart Tile option on the ‘unique_zips_count’ field and grouped by ‘ID’.
To track the problem down, I had to use the sample tool to grab x number of recs and see if it would run through the Tile tool. I had to keep skipping and selecting first N recs until I narrowed the problem down to 20 records. As it turned out. all values were 0 in a specific group. I found a workaround by pulling all recs per group with a value of 0 and bypassing these with the Tile tool. Instead of doing that - could you add an ExceptionHandler and specify which RecNo it crashed on?

Can you also add option to use 1, 2, or 3 std dev in addition to smart? This way all my groups will be uniform.
  

I think there should be a tool that allows you to produce grand totals for any numeric field you want. In the tool, you should be able to check off the fields you wish to be totaled at the bottom. I prefer this over having to use the summary tool and then using the union tool to produce totals at the bottom of my output. 

Pretty simple but could be helpful when troubleshooting and reviewing.  Allow a user to have rows be banded in a different color, allow the user to select how to do the grouping to band.  For example, a large browse tool has several thousand rows, sorted by product name.  Each product has between 5 and 50 rows each.  If a user could set color banding by product,.. they could easily find the "breaks" between product rows.  This could be somewhat similar to the Excel table formatting option for banded rows,.. you could simply alternate bands,.. but would be nice to be able to group the bands by some column attribute in the data.

This may be a little easier than constantly opening new browse windows with the selected records,. or to use filters or other tools to group the data for review / troubleshoooting purposes.

Idea:   I think the Interface Designer's "Test View" window should allow control parameters to act like "Text Boxes" and allow the designer to manually edit, or type a control parameter for use in a debug module.
 
When designing batch macros, there currently is not an easy, built-in way to test or debug their functionality.  There are two reasons to build a batch macro:
1) to reconfigure the macro at run time, just as if they were the answers to questions in the macro GUI;
2) to group the records going in the macro inputs into batches.
If I am designing a macro to perform the 1st function -- reconfigure the macro at run time -- I need to be able to test its functionality in a debug module.
 
The Interface Designer's "Test view" window should provide this ability by allowing you to type an example control parameter value.  However, the Test View window only allows you to "dropdown" to a value via a dropdown box.  This dropdown box is always empty, thus never allowing you to enter a test control parameter.  I think the Interface Designer's "Test View" window should allow control parameters to act like "Text Boxes" and allow the designer to manually edit a control parameter for a debug module.
 
I've attached a screenshot of a simple, two control parameter batch macro.  As you can see, in the Interface Designer, I don't have a way of inputting a value in either control parameter field to open a debug module.
 
 

 

It would be great if we could select default settings for containers, so that when they are added they could be automatically set to narrow margins and gray background (or whatever). (PS I'm going to add another idea regarding idea categories, because "tools" and "designer" aren't available categories, but that seems like the best place for this idea).

Many files I use are in .xlsb format. 

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 think it would be great, especially if you have browse tools at multiple phases in workflow, to be able to view Browse results while module is running, rather than having to wait until it's done. I think it would help with being able to head off problems sooner.

Functionality to append to Calgary Databases.  Currently we are unioning Calgary Database to another dataset and overwriting existing Calgary database.  Ability to append would cut down on data processing.

Hi, I've seen some requests lately where the users are requesting maps in  EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format, which is an

Adobe Illustrator file type. If this could be added as a Report Render output type, along with BMP, it would make the tool even more useful. Thanks!

Add an option to cancel an occurrence currently queued to run without it removing, or completing, the original schedule. Not sure if this is by design or a bug but when you cancel a workflow that's in queue, it sets the scheduled workflow to "Completed" even though you just wanted to stop that occurrence and still keep the workflow schedule “Active”.

Also, adding an option to PAUSE a scheduled module. This is useful when you need to temporarily suspend a workflow from running, but save the hassle of re-configuring the schedule when you want to turn it back on.

Here is a thought I posted about on my Alteryxuser blog: http://alteryxuser.blogspot.com/2015/02/alteryx-and-github-place-for-sharing.html. I interested in hearing your comments!

In recent months a new global app was added to allow the monitor of activity on an application. This is a great start but more details would make tracking a lot easier for our company.  We update the apps on a monthly basis due to the continual change of data, this will only allow us to track activity for the prior month only.  1 month's activity is not a beneficial gage for usage for us. 

What I would like to see is the ability to look at activity based off of a designated time frame of activity.  Since one of our apps can generate up to 5 different reports depending on what is selected, it would be a benefit to us to be able to track which report the user is running vs just running the overall app itself. 
 

I'm using .sv file format for compressing large files and using them in Alteryx.  .sv is call a Alteryx Spatial Zip file.  This format seems to offer the highest level of compression of all the Alteryx file format types.  Is this suitable for text also?  Is it usable in real time vs uncompressing first then using in a workflow?  If not, I think a compressed real time file format would be a nice addition.

Would be nice to have the option of disabling the append of the "action" to the variable in the summarize tool.  Sometimes it's useful to leave the variable name as is when making tweeks to your module. 

Make it easier to use Delete and connect around 

ex: Shift + Delete

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.

Would be nice to have a place where general use macros or packages could be published by the community and then used within the designer.

Thinking of something along the lines of the NuGet package manager: https://www.nuget.org/
 

I love the new Basic Filter option and it makes writing filters easy/self-expanatory for new users and helps with functions like isnull(). However, I'm almost always writing what are now called 'Custom Filters' and it takes two clicks to do this.

From a User Experience perspective it would be great if you could click in the expression box to write the filter rather than having to check the customer filter check box, or start by creating a basic filter and then make it more complex using the custom filter box without having to check the tick box.

Following on from this and something that is probably a lot harder to implement - But with the new basic filter, it would be great to have a list of available fields populate the options to filter by - Similar to the option that you get in Calgary. E.g Country == and then the drop down list would contain whatever is available in the data (e.g. Spain, UK, USA, Etc...)