Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

What if you had the option to connect tools without the lines going across the canvas?
This might be useful in cases where one connection is close but another is far away.
Of course, it would need to be easy to turn these on and off, and to jump from one end to the other.
The idea came up at a SoCal Alteryx users group this summer. Would other people like to see something like this?

For an email event, there are several defaults that are shown in the body (e.g., %User%, %ComputerName%, %WorkingDir%).

It would be nice to add a date in there, maybe %Date% or %DateTime% or something like that which would display the computer system time.

It would be nice to have Directory tool working for ftp. I would like to have the list of files on a ftp server including sub folders

After visiting with a new user who was not sure how to set up a filter, we came up with the following idea.

We would add a "simple" option to the existing Filter tool with some basic controls that would automatically create the expression for you.

Do others think this would be helpful?




Geoff Jones
Alteryx, Inc
Product Manager – User Experience

I have recently been building some reports and have some suggestions for later releases of Alteryx.
 
1.       Map tool – have option to put border around map within the properties window.  Currently, I have to use a layout tool to put a border on a map.
2.       Map tool – Same thing with legend (especially when legend is output as a separate field
3.       All tools – be able to put a browse tool after the tool using the Properties window.  I was thinking right above the “Apply” button (check mark bottom left corner)
 
Just some thoughts that would make life better.

Similar concept to how when you right click on a folder, computer icon, or file in windows. When you right click on any of these things you are able to pull up a properties link/tab which gives you relevant information and path of the file location.

For this particular idea the properties tab will give information on the Alias, such as server type, connection type; ie microsoft  provider or oracle provider, etc.

This would be helpful not only to go back and understand why you choose that connection type, but also when training others.

Thank you

We use the test tool extensively in our App and Macro authoring. It would be very useful to have the ability to label the tested values so that when the Test tool writes to the output window it’s more descriptive.
Example:
Currently this is the report
Error: Market (1): Tool #235: The test "The count of Columns does not match the count of Labels." failed: TargetNumRecords(#2)==102, NumRecords(#1)==106
 
 
A more useful report would be
Error: Market (1): Tool #235: The test "The count of Columns does not match the count of Labels." failed: Columns (#2)==102, Labels (#1)==106

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.