Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello, I am very new to Alteryx, so my suggestion might appear elementary for the veteran-users. From the standpoint of adoptation by less technical people (moving from Excel to Alteryx), would it be possible to take common scenarios of Fuzzy Matching and automate them?

For example, if you have 2 databases and you want to match and clean them up, you have to have close to 10 steps, with sorting, adding unique identifiers, joining, fuzzy matching, etc. Just look at your video named "Fuzzy Matching" or other videos for Tableau+Alteryx. They idea is basic. If you know most common use cases and you have already developed a methodology for how to solve these cases, why not have them as part of the tools library?

Also, when matching, for example universities, wouldn't it be easier if all those common, aka appearing many times, words were automatically suggested to be removed from the "match". Example: University A and Univeristy B are two different Universities, but they share the common word "University". While it's important that this word is there, it is not the reason to pair these two together. Maually going through and identifying and typing these common words is an extra step. It would be much easier to have a pop list of these common words and the count of records in which they appear, sorted by the count, and a check box to include or exclude the words.

Thank you,

Olga

Link to the Fuzzy Matching video. Check Minute 9:41.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZiM2YSCCY&index=13&list=PLfSLx4WE4q52YoGEzJEBalfNou6jfRTF0&nohtml5...

Hi everybody! As you can read here I had the necessity to insert a macro (publish to tableau server) at the end of a self-made app.

I have actually found 2 different ways to solve the problem:

1) Turn the macro into an app and use 2 chained apps.

2) Copy and paste tools (normal and interface) from the macro to my app.

Both solution work, but both require some (quite a lot to be honest) editing and re-work that actually is already done. It's kind of like to re-invent the wheel!

A quick way to merge 2 configuration interfaces would be really usefull.

It would be nice if I had a workflow that had multiple paths to be able to run only one line of it.  This would allow me to only run what I needed so instead of having to run the entire workflow, I would be able to run up to a certain point and only run tools that are required to get to that point.  

Other tools that I have used allow you to determine where you are caching from so instead of always having to cache at the input, you could cache after a big join.  This would be great for efficiency as having to run everything through the entire workflow every time is innefficient and I end up spending a lot of time waiting for my workflow to go through the same tools.  

Hey guys!!

I was just thinking... they might not need to fully build out a python ide, but could still reach the same objective.

You should be able to keep a python file on its own and call it in r.  By doing this, you might be able to have the json/xml handling of python with the visual/stats power of R while it being nicely bundled in your workflow.  This uses base functions in r and does a good job turning a pandas dataset to an r dataframe you can move along your workflow.

You could always just use this same idea to write a file somewhere and once it's written, your workflow will continue.  If you do, the code is literally 1 line in r...  Anyway, let me know your thoughts! 🙂

Will this work for your organization?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-python-r-windows-7-subhash-jaini?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publ...

In the designer it would be nice if the projection of a .shp file could automatically be read by its corresponding .prj file.

There is a great functionality in Excel that lets users "seek" a value that makes whatever chain of formulas you might have work out to a given value. Here's what Microsoft explains about goal seek: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-Goal-Seek-to-find-a-result-by-adjusting-an-input-value-...

My specific example was this:

In the excel (attached), all you have to do is click on the highlighted blue cell, select the “data” tab up top and then “What-if analysis” and finally “goal seek.” Then you set the dialogue box up to look like this:

 Set cell: G9

To Value: 330

By changing cell" J6

And hit “Okay.” Excel then iteratively finds the value for the cell J6 that makes the cell G9 equal 330. Can I build a module that will do the same thing? I’m figuring I wouldn’t have to do it iteratively, if I could build the right series of formulas/commands. You can see what I’m trying to accomplish in the formulas I’ve built in Excel, but essentially I’m trying to build a model that will tell me what the % Adjustment rate should be for the other groups when I’ve picked the first adjustment rate, and the others need to change proportionally to their contribution to the remaining volume.

There doesn't really seem to be a way to do this in Alteryx that I can see. I hate to think there is something that excel can do that Alteryx can't!

Just ran into this today.  I was editing a local file that is referenced in a workflow for input.

When I tried to open the workflow, Alteryx hangs.

When I closed the input file, Alteryx finished loading the workflow.

If the workflow is trying to run, I can understand this behavior but it seems odd when opening the workflow.

Dear Alteryx

Typing econometric formulas within the Formula tools can be very tyring when formulas are long and complex

What would be very nice, would be to have the possibility the get a a kind of "Formula" format (in adition to double , string, datetime ...).

When the format is set to Formula, Alteryx automatically detect that it is a formula and use it as such.

It would allow to import easily external models formulas without to type or paste them within Alteryx

Many thanks

Arno

Hi,

Today I pressed F1 in the Output Tool to find out what the setting Transaction Size does. It turned out that this is not documented.

It would be a great idea to make a documentation that covers the options of a tool.

Regards,

Frank 

Can you devise a way to bring out the dynamic network visualisation on to Powerpoint.  Right now, we can only see a static image on a browser

Idea to have the option to include the workflow "meta info" (last tab of the workflow configuration when clicking on the cavas) when printing the workflow.

The Meta Info desciption and author sections would be particularly of value. Currently on the long file name is embedded in the header.

The "Field Summary" tool and several others have a configuration requirement that provides a list of fields to select or deselect.  The selection action is singular meaning you can only effect the action on one item in the list of many.  As the number of fields we work with grows significantly this becomes a time consuming and tedious task.

This should be enhanced to allow highlighting of multiple fields to select or deselect as we can do in tools like the "Select" tool.

The field summary tool is an excellent resource to get an overview of the data and spot targets for analysis or data cleansing. 

Unfortunately it has limitations either in the number of fields included or some combination of the number of fields and one or more of its attributes.   There is nothing in the documentation I found to make a user aware of this. When you exceed N  fields selected the system just hangs, indicating it is running but there is no connection progress shown and nothing seems to happen, even if you limit input to 1 record.

Through trial and error I found an approximate limit in number of fields I can include and still have it work.

I request that Alteryx update the tool help info and devise enhancements to dynamically load balance the tool so it can scale to the number of fields requested or at least warn when the limit is reached or approached.  The latter warning could be similar to the red font warnings in the formula tool when you have a malformed expression.  However a load balancing version is most desired.

The issue as it stands results in users wasting a lot of time trying to make the tool work as expected, then report it to support as an apparent bug in the tool which can be argued both ways.

I realize in the real world there are limits but in this real world we are seeing the number of fields to analyze increase significantly, especially when you have a data license and integrate 3rd party data to you own native data adding a hundred or hundreds more fields.

How about adding the ability to split intersecting trade areas at the points of intersection to create two new spatial objects.  The two objects could then be used to process customer records and divide them into "territories" based on  the line of intersection.

Hi Alteryx,

I tried importing a file into my text input tool and I ran across this error.

Why is there a limit? Can we get rid of it since we're not living in DOS anymore.

I am trying to use the Dynamic Replace to selectively update records in a set of variables from survey data. That is, I do not have all potential values in the “R” input of Dynamic Replace. Instead, I have a list of values that I would like altered from their current values by respondent (RespondentID) and question # (Q#).  Currently, when I run the workflow, any Q#/ResponseID combos that are not in my “R” input are replaced with blanks. However, I would like an option that maintains the original data if there is nothing to replace the data with. Without this option, there are few (I'm still working on some ways) workarounds to ensure the integrity of the data.

Matt

The community could benefit from easier integration of splitting and applying functions to grouped data. The summarize tool is great for splitting your data and applying summary statistical functions. It would be super useful to take that block just one step further, and allow users to apply any other (aggregate) function to their grouped data instead of just the built-in functions in the summarize tool. I would envision that aggregate function either being a custom function that is a combination of existing user-specified functions within Alteryx (e.g. in the formula tool) and/or even an interface that allows you to use other Alteryx macros on the grouped data.

Apply user-defined functions, or other powerful Alteryx macros to grouped and data is a very common operation in the data analyst's daily workflows and being able to apply them without reverting to batch/iterative macros in a seamless manner would be naturally helpful.

https://ramnathv.github.io/pycon2014-r/explore/sac.html

During execution the user cannot scroll around. Large workflows need to be shrunk to very small icons to be able to follow the progress. Either have an option to automaticaly center on the active icon or allow scrolling during execution.