Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

We build some pretty robust maps with multiple connections and it would be great to copy the map tool and paste it with all of the connections when we want to tweak the map slightly but keep our original map.  It is a regular occurrence for us to have a very detailed map grouping by trade area name and then may want to have an overview map with all of the same connections but slightly different layout.  Tracking down the connections, reconnecting them and naming them accordingly takes a substantial amount of time even in the most organized of workflows.  This function would be a huge time-saver.  It would also be of value with joins and unions - anywhere you have multiple streams coming in.

Often as I am scraping web sites, some clever developer has put an invisible character (ASCII or Unicode) in the data which causes terrible trouble.

I've identified 89 instances of zero-width or non-zero-width glyphs that are not visible and/or Alteryx does not classify as whitespace. There are probably more, but Unicode is big y'all.

Unfortunately, the Trim() string function only removes 4 of these characters (Tab, Newline, Carriage Feed, and Space).
REGEX_REPLACE with the \s option (which is what the Cleanse macro uses) is a little better but still only removes 20. And it removes all instances, not just leading and trailing.

I've attached a workflow which proves this issue.

@apolly: this is what I mentioned at GKO.

And I did see this post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Elegantly-remove-all-ASCII-characters-...), but it's too brute force. Especially as Alteryx is localized and more users need those Unicode characters.

I think it would be nice to be able to more easily reorder fields that you're joining by in the Join tool.

For example, I have already joined by CASS_Address and CASS_City. After I did this, I realized I wanted to go back and join on Name, too, and I want that to be first. How the tool is configured now, if I want Name to be first, I must redo all of the drop downs. I would like to be able to add Name to the next set of open drop downs then use some arrow buttons to be able to move them up in the order (similar to the Summarize tool).

Hi to all,

I have seen one or two posts requesting ability to total up rows and/or columns of numbers, however this idea also requests the ability to subtotal data by a field and also produce an overall total.

This could be an extension to existing tools such as 'Summarise' and 'Cross Tab' or could be a stand alone tool.  Desired output of using a tool like this would produce something like this:

This would be incredibly useful for building reports within Alteryx as well as analysing the data, and cut down the amount of tools currently required to produce this.  I have seen a third party tool which does some of this but this adds the ability to subtotal.

thanks - Roger

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

Alteryx is unlike many BI tools in the sense that it joins NULL. It is difficult to think of another platform that has this behaviour. Either people know about this and work around it or they don't and their joins are a ticking time bomb. Please add a check box to the Join and Join Multiple tools to allow or prevent joining NULL. This will serve to remove the need for workarounds as well as educate users about this default behaviour.

Hi,

     Currently loading large files to Postgres SQL(over 100 MB) takes an extremely long time. For example writing a 1GB file to Postgres SQL takes 27 minutes! This is serious impacting our ability to use Alteryx as an ETL tool for loading our target Postgres Data Warehouse. We would really like to see the bulk load capacity to Postgres supported by Alteryx to help alleviate the performance issues.

Thanks,

Vijaya

Hi currently if you use the cross tab tool and the names of the new fields should have special characters they end up being replaced in the new headers with underscores "_", and then need to be updated in someway. It would be great if this was all done in the tool. In other words the new headers have the special characters as desired

Now that we have a Snowflake Bulk Loader option, it would be great to utilize the built-in Snowflake internal staging.  This eliminates the need for an end-user to have the technical know-how or access to IT resources to utilize a separate S3 bucket and generally reduces friction in the process. 

There was pretty widespread support in the original Bulk Load thread: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Snowflake-Bulk-Loader/idi-p/105291/page/2#co...

Hi,

I have 2 simple ideas that would help me a little bit while working with the explorer box: 

• I think it would be amazing if we could pick the Internet Browser while using the Explorer box. 

While opening certain websites, I am getting this information: 

I know probably the answer to it isn't so simple, but that would give us a little bit extra flexibility while using Explorer box. 

My goal is to open a word or excel file with specific documentation. If I were able to use a newer browser, I could easily open a file with a link to a webpage. 

• Second, can we give the Explorer box a header similar to what we got in the containers? The address bar does not always give us information about what the explorer box shows and a small extra header that we can configure would add some additional clarification

Alternatively, if I could merge a comment tool with the Explorer box tool that would also work.

In the community and in mixed teams - it's very common for people to be caught on the error that "This document was created in a more recent version".   Although there are several workarounds (e.g. this one from @WayneWooldridge  here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Adjusting-Alteryx-Files-for-Different-Versio...), this seems like it may be an easy problem to solve more permanently.

Could we add an option to Alteryx to save the file with the lowest compatible version number?

So - for example - if i'm only using components that shipped with version 10, then please mark the file as version 10.   If I've used a tool that shipped in 11.0.6 then that needs to be the version number.

This way - files will be back-compatible as far as is possible by default unless using newer components.

Many thanks

Sean

Highlighted in this post: Solved: DateDiff question - Alteryx Community The DateDiff function under certain conditions does not work as you would expect and I suspect most people would not notice the inaccuracy.

Here is the formula for the Results Column below:

DateTimeDiff("2022-11-30",[Date],"months")

Hello all,

HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) connection is widely used to load data efficiently on Hadoop, for Hive, Spark or Impala. However, it's not compatible with the new DCM.


Best regards,

Simon

Hi is it possible to look at alteryx workflows being run when a file has been dropped into a file or somehting along those lines? I.e an external activty has taken place

Need a way to highlight lines whether that means right-clicking and selecting a color or what-not, but just having the lines become black & BOLD doesn't cut it. It's not easy on the eyes. If I could click this line/connector and make it bright green that would be ideal and then I can see where it connects better when zooming out.

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.

It would be great if there was an output option for excel files where you could overwrite the data in the sheet, but keep the formatting in the sheet. Similar to how the Paste Values option works in Excel. This would allow me to create a template with data validation, conditional formatting, column widths, cell fill colors, etc and set a workflow to run on a schedule and just paste the data into the existing template.

To get around this right now I have to output it to a separate tab and then paste the columns as values over the existing template. This is fine unless I am out of the office and need to bother someone else to do it. I know there have been many times where i wish this was an option outside of the report I am currently building. I am honestly surprised I couldn't find an idea already submitted about this!

Thanks,

Wes