Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When dealing with huge workflows, I find myself often needing to use a select tool with comment above as a simple placeholder to come back to that data set as it helps me keep track of everything. It would be nice if there was a tool that didn't really have a function in itself besides allowing one to reference back to that spot. 

I understand one could use a browse tool to achieve the same result but the reason I like using the select tool is because it's a lot easier to work off the dataset with an output arrow whereas with a browse tool I would have to find the previous spot I had the data and delete the browse tool that I was using as a placeholder. 

In python, there is this monthrange function which is very useful to find out the days in particular month and also particular year (leap year)

In python we will only have to do this to get monthrange

 x[i] = calendar.monthrange(Year_S, Month_S)[1]

whereas in Alteryx, we will have to do this

datetimeday(DateTimeTrim(DateTimeParse([START_DATE],'%Y-%m-%d'),'lastofmonth'))

The different are enormous and I can see that Alteryx team was able to add in this in a jiffy.

I was hoping we can simplify the code so that users wont have to go and dig around to find a way to get thru.

This will be helpful in doing calculations like insurance/interest premium, where we need to find the remaining days of in the month.

Hello all,

As specified in the title, this idea is to distinguish between Append Prefix/Suffix to File and to Table on the Output Data Tool.


For most files (csv...), the table name does not really exist. However, for at least Excel files, if you choose this option, the result will be one sheet by suffix and the only option to have one file by suffix will be to change entire file path.

Best regards,

Simon

It would be great if you could fix the Interactive Trainings - great idea to have them, but they are constantly down (at the moment Apps does not work, then went to Predictive Grouping, which also does not work). Not quite sure why this is so complicated, maybe the whole thing could be moved to youtube (if you have server limitations) and then have the test questions separately on the alteryx website.

Really demotivating that whenever I have an hour to learn  during the day, it is a lottery, whether the interactive trainings will work or not.

Before new ideas, we should also be conscious of getting the basics right.

Thanks

Hi there team,

When using the sort tool - it's impossible to really develop much speed and muscle memory because you're always having to switch between keyboard and mouse.

Can we please add to the sort tool to make this a hyper-quick experience for the user?

Current Experience:

I currently have the select tool selected want to add a sort after this to sort on 3 columns:

• I hit ctrl-shift-f to go to the advanced find
• Then type "sort"
• Then I switch from keyboard to mouse, and drag this sort tool on to my canvas
• I then want to start configuring this tool - so I need to then need to mouse across to the configuration box
• hit the drop-down box with the mouse to get focus on that row in the sorter
• type or mouse select the right field - this is especially painful if there are a lot of fields
• then mouse again to get to the ascending / descending sort option
• then repeat for all other fields

Proposed alternative path:

I want to add a sort tool immediately after the currently selected tool:

• ctrl-alt-s (my user-defined shortcut for the short tool)
• control-space to enter config mode which defaults to configuring sort order for first field
• start typing the field-name - this does a look-ahead search like google.com does
• when I find the field I want, hit tab and have the same experience with asc / desc
• hit tab again, go to sort row 2 - repeat
• NEVER have to touch the mouse

As we all know - when you develop muscle memory for an IDE - not only does this remove the barrier between thought and delivery - but it also makes it more sticky as a platform (you don't want to change products because you are used to the keyboard shortcuts on this one) - so not only would this improve user speed - it would also make sense from an economic perspective for retaining customers through stickiness.

cc: @Hollingsworth 

When you have a wide recordset - it often takes dozens of clicks to get a field from the bottom of the select order to the top - to the point where many users resort to going into the XML Editor, copying the XML; popping it into Notepad++ and then editing the XML by hand

Could we instead have an option to "Move to position" with a keyboard shotcut - for example - if I want the "Max BeaconID" column to move to position 1 in the select list, I hit ctrl-shift-M - then press 1 and this / these fields move to the top of the select list.

This should be a relatively easy win for the dev team, and a big win for the users - dozens of mouse-clicks eliminated.

Thank you

cc: @Hollingsworth 

In workflow Constants, it would be really useful to be able to populate a new field associated with each user created constant. 

E.g. Type, Name, Value, "Description"

The description could be left blank but also populated by workflow designers to attach commentary / business logic to the constant. 

E.g. Type = User, Name = MyUserConstant, Value = 0.25, Description = "This describes the weighting factor used in Product Calculations"

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Read-a-asc-document/m-p/883666#M212467

One of the common issues when you build macros is the error "the schema of macro output XXX has changed between iterations"

So the next step that we commonly follow is to put a select tool into the flow just before the macro output - and convert all the fields to a specific type; untick the "unknown" field; and then sometimes have to go into the XML to add the "Forced = true" flag into the XML so that it doesn't change over time:

Please could you add an option under the "Options" tab to force / lock down the type of every field with one click?     That would eliminate dozens of clicks on every creation of a macro.

Thank you 

Sean

It would be great to be able to display a table to the "Insights" section of the gallery - ideally one that can have formatting (eg row rules and column rules as per basic table tool)  

We see canvasses every day where dozens fields are brought into a canvas or a macro, but never used - and this just creates slowness for no good benefit.

Given that one of the selling features of Alteryx is the speed of processing  - could we look at three improvements to the Alteryx engine & designer:

• easiest: Keep track of every field brought in / created - and if they are not used in an output, then throw a warning at the end of the execution process
  • For example - you bring in fields a,b,c - you create field d and e during the flow in formula tools
  • Field d is never used as an input to any filters or formulae - and it doesn't appear on any output - so it's just waste
  • Field a and b are part of the output, so they are fine
  • Field c is never used at all - so that's just waste.
  • Field e is used to filter the records before output - so this one is fine.
  • So we've immediately found 2 fields that we can eliminate and make this canvas faster
• Medium: Ignore the unused fields in the execution engine
• Hardest: Tell the users that their field is unused in Alteryx Designer by doing a lineage analysis of the tools, just like software environments like Visual Studio do.    This may require a change to the engine & to designer 'cause we would need to make each tool capture the full detail of the fields that they know in their configuration in order to do this trace.

For more than 5 years It has annoyed me that numeric results in Designer are always awkwardly displayed as left justified. 

Nearly all conventional financial reports present numbers RIGHT justified with a vertical alignment of the decimal points and interval markers.   In Alteryx this convention is snubbed, at least in the Results Window, making it more work to interpret the results.

Given that Alteryx would like to sell more Designer licences 🤑 to those millions of accountants 🤕 still struggling in Excel hell , it would seem to be a smart move to concede on this small point. 

An easy way to deliver this enhancement would be either (1) via a user setting or (2) an enhancement of the   "Hide Numeric Separator" toggle in the upper right corner of the Results window:

When building iterative macros and debugging I tend to copy an paste the calculation part multiple times underneath to see what the status would be on iteration 2, 3, 4... However when there are multiple inputs to tools in the calculation steps, for example join tools or unions, then for each step it need re-connecting. 

So the idea is two fold

1) Allow the user to 'lock' an input so that when that tool is copied the upstream connection point is always the same, e.g. the R input for the join tool is automatically connected to the D input macro whenever that tool is copied

2) For iteration outputs, recognise that the select tool is connected to an iteration input so when it is copied it takes the iteration output as the upstream tool.

Please add reply-to field for email tool.

Hi Alteryx Team! 

Think an easy/useful tool enhancement would be to add a search bar on the "Tables" tab in the "Choose Table or Specify Query" popup when connecting to an In-DB source.

Current state, you have to scroll through all your tables to find the one you're looking for. Would be a HUGE help and time saver if I could just go in and search for a key word I know is in my table name.

Thanks! 

for example, the default filename is

FileA_P10.xlsx the P10 mean the month. and i want to give a freedom to user to amend or change the filename.  

hence, i put the interface text box to show the default text built by formula, but it only able to input text only.

from this > "FileA_P10.xlsx"

to this   >   "FileA_P" + datetimeformat(datetimetoday,"%m") + ".xlsx"

and it is better if it apply for other interface tool.

Hi all,

If you try to use Alteryx to solve simple recursive problems like the Towers of Hanoi; or solving Sudoku - you get this error

Please could we enable Alteryx to allow recursive macros - this would not only be helpful for problems such as Towers of Hanoi - it's also particularly useful for solving problems like walking an HR tree to get to the leaf nodes

This year, Microsoft updated improve their API (GraphAPI) to access Office365 enviroment.

Alteryx have launched on Microsoft District in Public Gallery the Dataverse , Onedrive & Sharepoint Connectors.

Alteryx must develop as soon as possible an connector/email with same authenticator options as connectors Above and improve the emails settings.

It´s important to release and documentation to show wich permissions on Azure it's necssary to send the emails. 

References:

Microsoft Announce:

https://docs.microsoft.com/pt-br/lifecycle/announcements/exchange-online-basic-auth-deprecated 

Azure Permissions:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/user-sendmail?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=csharp 

It would be really useful to select a default date for Date interface tools for the end user. Really useful in other interface tools and would save a lot of time in testing.