Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Hi,

Love the new Select tool column view, going back to the whole column name showing up...AWESOME!! I was wondering if the same could be applied to the Summarize tool. I'm on Alteryx 11.0 and the column names within the tool are truncated (like the Select tool used to be), can you also format it to where the whole column name appears in the tool?

Thanks!!

Alteryx is extremely user friendly. It is simple to use, self explanatory, and manages to ride the difficult line in balancing pre-defined "canned" tools, yet allow enough user-customization to embrace advanced users' specific requirements. One area in which Alteryx could further improve upon though is additional options/inputs for users to change default tool and canvas settings, as well as improved overall formatting shortcuts.

One of the differences between a truly autonomous, ever-green, or "corporate" solution and a "user-specific workflow" are tool annotations, tool names, and the overall presentation of a workflow. Without annotations and/or a tool naming convention, any given workflow still requires significant time for any user to sit down and truly understand any given workflow. However, with the settings as-is, this can be extremely time consuming, tedious, and monotonous at times. This can be reconciled with some sort of inclusion of default settings that intelligently can use some sort of user-input settings to better annotate tool names beyond the current default, as well as tool names. Specifically - the default annotation settings are good in thought/design, but poor in practice. They clutter workflows, are truncated past the very first few lines, and are usually always changed in final workflow drafts. One solution would be to allow users to set default annotations for specific tools (i.e., "Calculated Fields" for formula bars, and/or no annotations ever even), and utilize the current default annotation settings used now and applied to a hint display box that appears when hovering over any given tool. A different solution may be as simple as taking only new calculated field names as the annotation, rather than each field and its formula. In that instance, I have yet to see any final workflows in which the default annotations for every tool are kept. An even better solution would be to have some sort of canvas view that allows users to make mass, stream-lined changes to tool and canvas formatting - i.e., select all formula tools, and apply a single user-input formatting schema. Select multiple tool boxes and adjust their visual appearance, etc. Other default settings that would be nice to adjust are toolbox and comment settings, as well as saving custom templates for toolboxes/comment boxes. This would just eliminate all the time in which we create similar templates over and over between workflows. This would de-clutter workflows, save needless time always removing/adjusting default annotations, and allow yet another "quirk" that separates Alteryx above the rest.

Again, these are just a few suggestions in which I feel Alteryx can continue to set the bar, and the standard for the rest of the industry. Thank you!

It would be extremely useful to be able to modify a tool parameter with a single row output from another tool within the same workflow.  My current solution is to use either the Append Fields tool or embed the other tool into a batch macro with a single row as the input.  This would greatly simplify workflows and allow for a much more robust "programmatic" approach to workflow development.

When we open any workflow, its becomes very difficult to understand from which gallery I have opened the workflow(s). Could you please do something, so that once the mouse pointer gets move into the workflow tab in designer, it will display the corresponding path as well.

As part of our documentation process, we'd like to save the documented image of the Alteryx workflow to a OneNote project folder. However, the image quality of the Print->Send to OneNote option is too low to capture many of our processes.

It would really help the project documentation process if we could increase the image resolution of the output image so that the workflow can be zoomed in to and seen clearly. I think this could be achieved by either enabling larger paper sizes in the Page Setup, or by giving the ability to increase the DPI of the outputted image.

When you get an error message in an R tool it's almost impossible for a newbie to figure out what has just happened...

For eg. the normal R package randomForest sets 32 as a max number of classes for a given class variable

Thus when you happen to run randomForest on anything with > 32 classes you get an error, imposssible to figure out without searching on the net or better surfing on the community.

How about a basic rules checker providing message on the configs sayin;

"X" and "Y" variables are categoric and have more than 32 classes,

you have to fix thembefore running an RF tool in order to succeed"

In the same way In-DB generates SQL, might it be possible to have an In-PowerBI and generate DAX?

Hi,

As per our project, we need to publish the image into a PDF file which will be downloaded from web URL. when we download the image from web URL that will be saved as TIF format in our local machine. This TIF format is not being supported by Alteryx.

The tool needs an enhancement (to support TIFF) which can be used for converting tiff format to other  format OR directly tiff image should be usable in the report.

Thanks,

Raju Miyapuram

In previous version of Alteryx, when the user selected records in the Browse tool, a count for those records would show next to the display that shows the total record count. When you separated the windows (Browse map is in one window, Browse data in another) that feature went away on the data side (it still shows in the map view side). The only way to know how many records the user selected to is launch a whole other window showing just the selected records. Could you please bring back the selected records display, like in the attached image?

I´ve looked in the forums, and the idea is new. It would be great if there would be an option to make it possible to give tooltips when writing a formular yourself not only in the "basis-language of the installation", but also in e.g. english (as Lingua Franca). The reasoning: in Excel or Tableau I know many a command in only one language - and have to undergo a timeconsuming process of A) thinking AND B) looking it up in the language you have to use at that project.

Even Tableau does not offer this - and you have to create a lot of  calculated fields. Alteryx could gain in UI-friendliness...

I´ve looked in the forums, and the idea is new, although it has similarities to others. Since Alteryx already supports Crtl+c and Crtl+v - why not support "F4" as well. In ALL MS-Office programs it repeats the last step and thus eases the burden on mouse and user...

I realize that repeating a whole process might (!) not be feasible - but single steps (e.g. "Formatting to the similar size like the last item....") would already be very helpful.

Since Tableau does not offer this - and it has a lot more to format and repeat - Alteryx could gain in UI-friendliness...

In the Output Data tool, when the file type is YXDB, one of the options is to Save Source & Description.

Splitting these into "Save Source" and "Save Description" -- independent options -- would be useful.

Sometimes I don't want the file recipient to know how a field was derived but I want to include a description.

Right now there is no easy way of doing this.

Hi,

I recently started to take online trainings on Alteryx and came across Tile Tool. Though could understand the purpose to some extent, it would be great if the tool is explained in more depth along with more examples and also how the tile number is calculated for the examples.

Thanks,

Saipriya.

Occasionally, the Calgary Loader tool will not write out all fields passed to it.  This seems to happen after writing out a certain number of fields then later, when rerunning, adding a new output field.  Very annoying because you don't know it will happen until processing is complete and you examine the result.  I usually manually delete the calgary files prior to rerunning, to avoid the versioning, but it still happens.

Also, please make the versioning optional with a check box, default off.

Hello,

I work with alteryx databases a lot to store some historical data so I don't have to pull it in the future. It would be great if there was a way when creating the database, where I could lock them for editing and can only be edited by select usernames and passwords.

Thanks,

Chris

Hi All,

I believe the following would help improve the functionality of Select Tool.

The idea is to have a defaulting option for each of the field in the Select Tool (which I believe should be a light weight Tool i.e. not adversely impacting performance and gives best exhaustive picture of all columns flowing through a (/particular point in ) pipeline).

Following are some of the cases where defaulting might come handy -

1) Fields which are supposed to hold monetary data - instead of Null, one can put 0.00 to help roll up summary properly.
2) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say expiry date) - instead of Null, one can put some enterprise standards like 31-12-2099 to avoid mixing Nulls and 31-12-2099.
3) Fields which are supposed to hold purchase quantity/number of employees/number of merchandise - instead of Null, one can put 0 (and not 0.00) again to help with roll up summary.
4) Fields which are supposed to hold Currency - instead of Null, one can put USD.
5) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say this time create date) - instead of Null, one can hardcode actual date, or an additional feature to put Now() kind of functions.

At present one of the options of achieving same might be to put a Formula Tool and to code whatever is desired inside the Formula Tool.

Benefits of having the functionality inside Select Tool would be -

1) It would be more user friendly and call for faster build to just write '0.00' or 'USD' or '31-12-2099' as compared to writing IF IsNull()... statements.
2) Inside Formula Tool, user needs to pull desired fields from the drop down and hence exhaustive view of all fields passing through pipeline is not available.

Pain in selection of fields from drop down and writing actual formulas might be aggravated with the number of columns increasing and might be more prone to human omission related errors.

Thanks,
Rohit Bajaj

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted.