Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I would like an separate tool for rendering excel file, or more options in the render tool. Currently you have to manually give the size of the output sheet, and it makes all of the columns on the spreadsheet look odd. Having additional options like "Auto page size" would be tremendous. 

How about a “Temporarily Disable Tool” feature where the tool is disabled?  Just the same as the "Disable All Tools that Write Output" but would only apply to the specific tool you select.   But, Instead of having to delete or cut the tool and connect around (as this can be tedious)!  The feature could be applied to various preparation tools (and potentially more) to help save time.

For example, there are occasions when I might have a filter applied and would want to temporarily disable the tool only to see all results.  This has been the case when I have wanted to include hospital wards (by temporarily disabling the tool) I was filtering out to review in the summarized totals.

The specific tool could have the same hashed marking as the "Disable All Tools that Write Output".   The "Temporarily Disable Tool" feature could be listed when the specific tool is right clicked on.   - The workflow could also prompt to show that the user has a tool "disabled" to highlight to the user.

Edit: Spelling

Ability to ‘name’ the point created in the “Create Points” tool.

Instead of sticking a select tool after it to rename it from ‘centroid’ to Starting Location or Store location or whatever.

Scenario: I open a results window with a link, filepath, value, etc. and I want to copy the text.

If I click inside of that cell and press Ctrl +A, nothing happens.

If I click inside the cell, arrow to the end of the text, and then press Shift + Home; the contents of the cell are highlighted.

Why can't we have all of the Windows shortcuts?  Or am I missing something here?

Would it be possible to have the text wrap inside the box when we are creating new formulas?

I am having to render my Alteryx formatted reports to Excel and then upload the report to Google Sheets

It would be very useful (and improve the less well known Alteryx Reporting capabilities) to be able to render straight to a Google Sheet and preserve the formatting.

Thanks

Two very useful functions

According to https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_least.asp

The LEAST() function returns the smallest value of the list of arguments.

example : SELECT LEAST("w3Schools.com", "microsoft.com", "apple.com");

returns "apple.com"

GREATEST works exactly the same but returns the greatest value of the list of argument

As of today, Alteryx proposes max and min to deal with that, but it only works with number and , I think, it's an ambiguous syntax : Max and Min works both as an aggregation function and as a row function. I love to separate these two notions.

Having a more standard means also more interoperability.

On a related topic, the coalesce function is proposed here : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Coalesce-function/idi-p/841014

Best regards,

Simon

If a tool fails, there should be a way to customise the error message. Currently a way to do it: log all messages in a file, read that file with another workflow, then customise the messages (Alteryx workflow error handling - Alteryx Community). However, there should be a more convenient solution. We should be able to:

- Find/replace parts of a message.

- Specify, which tools messages to modify.

- Change the message type.

- Change the order of the messages in the results window, to prioritise the critical ones.

- Pick which messages cannot be hidden by "xxx more errors not displayed".

This would especially help for macros, as sometimes we have a specific tool failing within a macro and producing a non-user friendly message.

It would be good to have the ability to select what column to use for Primary key when using the "create new table" output option of the output data tool.

When using the "update: insert if new" output option, you receive the error "Primary Key required for Update" if table does not have primary key.

Workaround is to manually create table with primary key constraint.

I believe many have voiced out this as their pain point within the Community. Essentially, there is no straightforward method to import multiple Excel files which are password protected.

I understand that there is an R solution suggested by several users, however, that is not ideal as it can be difficult to obtain permission from internal Tech team to install the package on the users' computers. 

Re-saving them without password is not only a hassle, but also raises concerns for data protection and security.

This may have been raised before, but we would like to see the equivalent of PRICE and YIELD formulas from Excel in Alteryx's Formula tool. I believe many users in the finance industry are using formulas like these frequently and it would be helpful to be able to replicate the formula in Alteryx.

Manually building the formula is possible, however it is unnecessarily complicated especially if you are working on different calendar basis e.g. 30 /360 European.

Thank you!

Cross tab automatically alphabetizes the column headers this can be a little awkward when unioning on column position later on. Would be nice to have this as an optional feature through a tick box on the tool.

I've obviously been doing lots of work with APIs for this to be my second idea posted today which relates to an improved based on recent work with APIs, but I also believe this is wider reaching.

I've been using Alteryx now for over 4 years and always assumed implicit behaviour of the select tool, so would add a select tool as best practice into a workflow after input tools to catch any data type issues. However I discovered that only fields where you either change the data type, length or field name result in that behaviour being configured and subsequently ensured. I discovered this as part of API development where I had an input field which was a string e.g. 01777777. Placing a select tool after this shows this is a string data type, however if the input was changed to 11777777 the select tool changes to a numeric data type. Therefore downstream formulas such as concatenating two strings would fail.

The workaround to this is to change the select tool to string:forced, which is fine when you know about it, but I suspect that a large majority of users don't. Plus if you have something like 2022-01-26 which is recognised initially as a string, then the forced option will be string:forced, however if you wanted it to be date:forced you need to add a first select tool to change to date, and a second select tool to change to string:forced.

Therefore my suggestion is to add a checkbox option in the select tool to Force all field types, which would update the xml of the tool and therefore ensure what I currently assume would be implicit behaviour is actually implemented.

For deeply structured XML - it would be very helpful to be able to search XML (as you would using the DOM).     Even better would be to implement XML Query capability (a visual tool) within Alteryx so that XML data can be directly queried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery

If your "Dedicated Sort/Join Memory Usage" setting is set higher than the actual amount of RAM available on your machine, you will get a message in the Results window like this:

My understanding is that the Alteryx workflow will continue to limit itself to the lower memory level throughout the entire duration of running that workflow, even if more memory opens up while the workflow is running. If Alteryx were to check the amount of available RAM periodically while running workflows, Alteryx could take advantage of additional RAM that may open up, resulting in getting results faster. This is particularly valuable for Server environments when many jobs of all sizes are running concurrently.

It seems that there is good value in a "SuperCleanup" tool that could take commonly used ways of writing information and cleaning this up automatically.    This would work well if the tool reviewed the data in the column, and made a recommendation about the cleanup to apply.    The tool could cleanup the data; and then pop any non-conforming values into a separate column for you to explictly clean up.    

For example:

- 01 Jan 2015: this can be automatically cleaned up into a date

- 11:15 pm: this can be cleaned up into a time

- 40.7128° N, 74.0060° W; or 40° 43' 50.1960'' N and 73° 56' 6.8712'' W:    Both could be auto-converted to a centroid

- $ 55.20 or  £2,000,000.00 can be automatically converted to currency

- India; United States; Mongolia - can be automatically cleaned up as a country (there are only about 200 or so in the world, so it's a very finite list)

- NY; AZ; MI; can be cleaned up as US states

NOTE: if we make this extensible -then companies can auto cleanup SKUs; or location codes; etc

There are dozens of simple cleanups like this that we could add - which would each relieve BI people from the drudgery of having to clean these up each time themselves.

In working through challenge 77 it became apparent that here are a few useful formulae that would help with work like this:

OffsetFromPosition

Input: Point; Bearing; Distance; Units

Output: New point

Degrees to DMS:

Input: Degrees as floating point

Output: string with Degrees; minutes & Seconds

DMS to Degrees:

Inverse of the above

The Dynamic Input will not accept inputs with different record layouts.  The "brute force" solution is to use a standard Input tool for each file separately and then combine them with a Union Tool.  The Union Tool accepts files with different record layouts and issues warnings.  Please enhance the Dynamic Input tool (or, perhaps, add a new tool) that combines the Dynamic Input functionality with a more laid-back, inclusive Union tool approach.  Thank you.

I've had the need to Find & Replace inside of a formula that I've written.  Would it be possible to have that type of functionality inside of the expression builder?

Does anyone else think that it would be useful?