Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would love to see a tool that allows you to find the Top N or Bottom N% etc. using a single tool, rather than the current common practices of using 2-3 tools to accomplish this simple task. It's possible some/all of this functionality could be added by simply expanding the current Sample tool to include more options, or at least mirroring the configuration of the Sample Tool in the creation of a new "Top/Bottom Tool."

 

For example, let's say I wanted to find the top 5 student grades, and then compare all scores to those top 5 grades. I would currently need to do something along the lines of Sort descending (and/or Summarize Tool, if grouping is needed) + Sample Tool (First N Records) + Join the results back to the data. That's anywhere from 3-4 tools to accomplish a simple task that could potentially be done with 1-2.

 

I'm envisioning this working somewhat like the Top/Bottom rules in Excel Conditional Formatting (see below), and similar to some of the existing options in the Sample Tool (also see below). For example, rather than only being able to select the First N Records in the Sample Tool, I could indicate that I want to select the Top N Records, or the Bottom N% Records. This would prevent the additional step of having to group/sort your data before using the Sample Tool, especially in cases where you're then having to put your records back into their original order rather than leaving them in their grouped/sorted state. You'd still want to have the option of choosing grouping fields if desired. You would also need to have a drop-down field to indicate which field to apply the "Top/Bottom rules" to.

 

    

 

A list of potential "Top/Bottom" options that I believe would be great additions include:

• Top N
• Bottom N
• Top N %
• Bottom N %
• Above Average
• Below Average
• Within a Percentile Range (i.e. "Between 20-30%")
• Skip Top N
• Skip Bottom N

The value added with just the options above would be huge in helping to streamline workflows and reduce unnecessary tools on the canvas.

Hi Community,

I didn't have a clue where to post this. That is why I am sharing it here.

 

A small portion of the community users are content creators\community builders\people active on social media. Let's take me, for example. I am writing yammer announcements about Alteryx to our internal user group in my current company.

One of the materials that I recently started to share are weekly challenges, and I know other Alteryx communities that are internal often share them weekly.

I would love to have an opportunity to copy-paste some announcements that someone from Alteryx would prepare.

Please see the screenshot below as a reference:

 

 

The only thing that I would add is information about the level of difficulty + Main subject. In similar manner, to what we see on the weekly challenge index:

 

 

If this would be posted on the same topic week over week, community builders like me could follow a threat and copy paste a new post weekly.

 

At the same time, if someone would like to post it on social media. They can always showcase them on the network.

More information about Alteryx in many sources for almost free.

 

You must upvote this idea 😄

 

 

Hello everybody,

 

I'm seeing an increased usage of geojson and kmz files across many popolar open data.

Would it be possible to add them to the supported Alteryx input formats?

 

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 

 

 

Maybe it was a lack of planning, but I've had a need to rename a variable within a workflow and would like to (outside of the XML view) be able to rename the variable so that downstream tools don't have to be reconfigured (e.g. formula, join, union).  

Hi,

 

The basic table report tool could be improved by including a title option, such as a checkbox that allows you to add a title above the table.

When you want to add a title to a table, you must create a report text specifically for that purpose. The more significant improvement would be for situations in which you want to create tables grouped by a specific field. It would be nice to have the option to add a title per group as well, this would make it easier to add all of them to a report in a more dynamic way without having to do workarounds.

 

 

A cahce tool would allow a user to temporarily store a snapshot of inline data from previous run of the module.

Imagine a browse tool that was inline as opposed to a terminus tool (input and output). Now allow that browse tool to persist its data after a run of the module. When an option on that tool was activated, it would block all of the dependent tools upstream from it and instead send its cached data downstream.

The reason I think this would be a useful tool is that I often come to the end of creating a module when I'm working on the Reporting tools. I run multiple times to see the changes I've made. When the module has a lot of incoming data and complex data transformations, it can take a long time just to get to the point where the data gets to the reporting tools. This cache tool would eliminate that wait.

A tiny quality of life fix to make auto-complete in formulas even better:

 

When you have writ a formula, like below, auto-complete helpfully suggest field names

 

and enable me to select the right field

 

If I need to change this field again, auto-complete again pops up the possible fields

However upon selecting the new field, I get this mess where part of the old field is intertwined with the new field, leaving an invalid fomula without manual correction

notice the 2 x Business

 

Would it be possible for the program to remove the entire old field, before inserting the new field?

 

Alteryx should raise a Conversion Error if re-sizing of a string field in a Select tool results in data truncation. It does this for integers but if a string is truncated there is no indication of this in the workflow output.

Hi!

 

For a improved presentation of the GUI elements (Inteface Tools), may be to use for an Analytic App.

 

It would be great if it were possible to position the Interface Tools also side by side, instead of one above the other.

 

 

Best regards

Mathias

There are a number of requests for bulk loaders to DBs and Im adding MySQL to the list.

 

Really every DB connection (on prem and cloud) need some bulk loader capabilities to be added (if they don't have it already)

In normal output tool, when file type is csv, it is possible to custom select the delimiter.  It would be great to be able to have the same option in the Azure Data Lake output tool, so for example you can write a pipe delimited file to your ADLS storage account.

Currently, the "SQL editor" window only contain a box for typing text in, we could not see the schema and table on it's side as a reference, we need to jump back and force between "Visual Query Builder" and "SQL Editor" search for table and column names. If we could see the database schema and table in the SQL Editor interface, it will save us a lot of time.

@AdamR_AYX did a talk this year at Inspire EU about testing Alteryx Canvasses - and it seems that there is a lot we can do here to improve the product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eN7_XQByPQ&t=1706s

 

One of the biggest and most impactful changes would be support for detailed unit testing for a canvas - this could work much like it does in Visual Studio:

 

Proposal:

In order to fully test a workflow - you need 3 things:

• Ability to replace the inputs with test data
• Ability to inspect any exceptions or errors thrown by the canvas
• Ability to compare the results to expectation

To do this:

• Create a second tab behind a canvas which is a Testing view of the canvas which allows you to define tests.   Each test contains values for one or more of the inputs; expected exceptions / errors; and expected outputs
• Alteryx then needs to run each of these tests one by 1 - and for each test:
  • Replace the data inputs with the defined test input.   
  • Check for, and trap errors generated by Alteryx
  • Compare the output
  • Generate a test score (pass or fail against each test case)

This would allow:

• Each workflow / canvas to carry its own test cases
• Automated regression testing overnight for every tool and canvas

 

 

Example:

 

 

For this canvas - there are 2 inputs; and one output.

Each test case would define:

• Test rows to push into input 1
• Test rows to push into input 2
• any errors we're expecting
• The expected output of the browse tool

 

 

This would make Alteryx SUPER robust and allow people to really test every canvas in an incredibly tight way!

As we have the option to name the connector line in the Connection-Configuration, the option to color code those lines would be of great help. 

When you have an Alteryx workflow open, Alteryx seems to by default try to keep you up to date on what might be happening with your data when it runs through your workflow. So if you for example add a misconfigured tool (a filter not connected to an input) and click somewhere on the canvas it'll presumably try to compile the code and then figure out that the new tool is misconfigured and it'll tell you why. A major thing it does seems to be that it tries to figure out if macros included in the workflow have changed and to take such changes into account so that it can notify you if there's a problem somewhere e.g. with the macro's output schema or whatever. I know it's doing this kind of thing because the moment I add a macro to the workflow I'll have to spend a 15-20 second 'tax' every time I touch the workflow canvas, a formula, when I click on a join, etc. Sometimes it's 30 seconds, sometimes you get lucky and it'll only be 5 seconds. This delay is by now from my perspective considered a fixed cost of adding a macro to a workflow. I'm assuming similar processes also take place in the context of other dependencies (main one probably being queries inside input tools) and that they may also cause problems for similar reasons.

 

I'm assuming part of the reason for the long delays is that the macro repository where we usually save macros in my organisation is saved in a server location which is close to the Alteryx server executing the in-production workflows/macros, but not close to me when I'm developing in my office. Yes, I could save the macros I develop elsewhere (locally) and then only save them in the repository when they're 'complete' (...we all know exactly when that's the case; we're never in doubt about that, right? ...and you'll still have problems if you need to modify a workflow which includes macros later, even if you're not touching the macro itself). I'm actually doing that in some contexts where the above user experience has been frustrating enough to justify such a step, and I'm always trying to find ways to just outright kill Alteryx' live connection to the macro (e.g. by caching the output) if it's not critical. But these things are not solutions, they're poor workarounds some of which are adding complexity and the potential for errors as a result of a problem which really shouldn't be a problem.

 

It would be desirable to have the option to pause these kinds of 'background processes'/'semi-live compiling'/'whatever', make Alteryx do this kind of thing less frequently, add an 'only update meta-data when running' option, or some fourth option of a similar nature. Debugger-mode is implicitly always on, why not give the option of turning that off if the user figures s/he can handle that? Give me the error when I try to run the workflow, don't try to have the software figure out if the code will run with an error every time I even touch it - this is not always helpful, it's in some contexts causing a huge waste of developer time.

As mention on this post here I would love the ability to change the map provider to any other map service (Mapbox, google, some other paid option). This could be achieved by adding a "Map Severs" option in the default configuration and where you put in the map server details.

Hi Alteryx team,

The current UI options for building Alteryx Apps are very restrictive. Three simple changes could allow us to build much more feature rich apps.

1. Make the html sdk for building custom tools available for building Alteryx App interfaces.

2. Allow us to place objects from the interface palette next to each other (horizontally)

3. Allow the text in Labels and text box tools to be driven from incoming data fields, for instance in a chained app.

When you use the Visual Query Builder, you can drag and drop tables to arrange them clearly (to show the star or snowflake schema, for instance). 

 

When you close the Visual Query Builder and reopen it, the tables are all left-aligned in a long column, with the joins overlapping each other. Since many of our tables are very wide (i.e., with many columns), this makes it cumbersome to locate the correct table and field.

 

I would like the manual positioning of the tables to be saved in the Visual Query Builder, to

1. Make the logical arrangement clearer to the developer and later users
2. Make it easier to locate tables/fields without scrolling downward

This is a feature that our users were very accoustomed to in Hyperion Intelligence, our legacy BI tool, which works similarly to the Visual Query Builder (shown below).