Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently In tools like the select and join you have the ability to sort the field order by ‘Field’. As I understand if this sorts the fields by ASCII order from the smallest to the largest character that you can display.
 
The English-language ASCII sequence is consistent with the order shown in the following:
blank ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z[ ] ˆ_
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { } ~
 
I would find it very useful to have the ability to use a dictionary sort in these tools.

Like many of you, I have a lot of modules and macros ... and growing. I keep them fairly organized in different folders and subfolders but sometimes I can't find that particular module I was working on weeks ago.... and I need to get it now. Now I end up doing an advanced search in windows explorer by date and maybe looking for certain keywords.
It would be nice to keep track of them in alteryx - add tags, customer names. depts to modules (meta info tab)?
Maybe a special container/gui with time line would read the meta info tab so you can more easily find that one module/macro

Also, another gui containing tool name tags so you can easily find all module that use that one tool you're looking for

It would be very useful to be able to add trendlines (linear, power etc) to charts (particularly scatter graphs) as in Excel.

Whilst not quite as efficient, the ability to overlay a line graph onto a scatter would enable the user to achieve a similar result as the points for the line can be calculated.

I just upgraded to the new Alteryx 8.6 which I'm looking forward to using, however, it is quite frustrating that none of my customized user settings are maintained during the install process. I make a few customizations:

• Vertical layout
• Showing the grid and the XML
• Turning off the "module complete" pop-up
• My 'panes' where I put them
• A few favorite tools in the "Favorites" toolbar

And there are so many other customizations that I don't go near (but might if they were maintained during upgrade), like:

• Default temporary path and Logging
• Dataset defaults
• Zoom levels
• Startup page & Distance units

Please implement a way of maintaining these settings!!

I would like the ablity to view the processing order of tools within module prior to processing and if needed reprioratize which tool processes first/last.  It would also be great to have the ablity to disable a subset of tools within a module prior to processing.

Create a new module that outputs statistics after processing. For instance creating a table of all used modules by reference number with fields for records input, records output, processing time, processor load, memory used.  As well as starttime, endtime, username, hostname, etc.  This would make debugging quite a bit easier, expecially if the results could be output to Excel.

When using spatial processing tools please add the abilty to join between the target and universe based on a field.  This field based join could be used to narrow the geographies prior to performing spatial tests thus greatly improving processing time.

From a user standpoint there’s not a good reason for these locations to not be linked.

It would be nice to be able to append to a YXDB instead of having to read in the whole thing, union the new records, and then re-create it. 

The Alteryx icon image on the Windows tab at the bottom of the screen should change or change color when running and when a module has finished running. I got this idea from Teradata SQL Assistance. When the query is finished the little icon (which is sunglasses) changes from red (running) to green when complete. 

Whenever Alteryx recognizes a field as a Date, it should default to Date, not Date/Time. I don't think I'm in the minority, but I rarely need to see the date AND the time. 99.9% of all of my date fields do not have a time associate with them; such as: Open Date, Close Date, Remodel Date, Lease Expiration Date, Lease Start Date, Date Record Updated, Relocation Date, etc., etc., etc. So I always get results like 4/1/2013 12:00:00, which makes it difficult to query against without changing to just Date. I would venture to guess that most people don't use the time either, but I may be wrong. So, defaulting to just Date would save a lot of us that extra step for each date column.

It would be good to be able to fix pie chart colours (either automatically of manually), so that when building a report, categories are given the same colour throughout the report across multiple pie charts.  Currently, if the number of categories being shown varies, there is no way to manually align the colours (In the Bar Chart type there is a Style Mode for the Series where you can use a formula to assign a colour based on a criteria such as the name, but not for pie charts).

 

In continental Europe, decimals and comma are used differently.  The number 1,345,678.99 would be written in some countries as 1.345.678,99

As a suggested enhancement request, it would be good in the Alteryx user settings to be able to select a country style setting to be applied to numbers throughout the software, such as in a browse, table, report etc. so they are displayed correctly for that user.

I would like the ability to adjust the sort order of the tools displayed in the actions tab when creating a Macro, or at least have it conform to some sort order that can be easily identified. I can't currently make sense of this sort order which makes it hard to find the tool I’m looking for.

I would like to be able to pause a module A, run module B then restart A at a later time.   

Alteryx Designer should automatically save my modules on a regular basis so that if I have a failure of some sort, my hard work will not be lost.

I would like to specify two points on a map and have Alteryx create a spatial object that represents the best route from one point to another given some parameters such as quickest route, or shortest route.

In the map input tool, it would be really nice if I could type in an address or a geography (like "Boulder County"), and the map would be zoomed to that location, and maybe even draw a point for me (if it is an address) or draw the geography polygon so that I can use that for downstream analysis.