Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx is brilliant at handling dates and understands them natively. Very often businesses want to analyse money, and in all sorts of ways. In Alteryx if a column contains $123.45 Alteryx thinks it is a string, and one then has to mess around converting it to a number. Alteryx should recognise that anything like $123.45 or €123 or £1,234,567 is actually money and is a number not a string. This could be achieved either by  having a money datatype (like MS Access) or if that is too hard, a function that converts a string version of money into a number irrespective of padding, commas or decimal points.

Regards

Mark

Pardon the length of this post, but I have been working with Alteryx since version 2.0 (11 years) and have been accumulating a wish list ever since.  Some of these suggestions have been made in the past but have yet to be embraced.  This is the first post for the first 'idea' but, as I said, this is a wish list that has grown since I was first introduced to Alteryx. More posts will follow.

I will break this into sections to hopefully make the suggestions easier to categorize and digest.

Application interface - Since I was introduce to Alteryx, the application interface (what is presented to users) has remained rather stagnant and, with the rumored push to adopt HTML as a replacement for pcxml, could benefit from the following additional settings. I suggest these based on the fact that dot Net classes for interface controls are readily available in Windows which allow for manipulation of each of the controls attributes.

1. The ability to set 'style' attributes for each of the interface tools in the application interface (font-family, font-style, font-size, font-weight, color, etc. This could be presented to the developer as an additional (perhaps optional button) in the Configuration panel for each interface tool as below:

These settings would be specific to the type of interface tool and to how the individual tool would layout and/or be styled relative to the application interface window. One layout option, applicable to most interface tools, would be where the label would be relative to the object itself (top, bottom, left, right). The CSS could be stored in and interpreted from the XML of the yxwz file referencing the ToolID of the Node in a section of the XML hierarchy called <CSS> or something standard.  An option to alter the default CSS could be displayed with a radio button control so that if not selected, the tool would fallback to the default system CSS of the tool.  This default could also be set in System settings so that a consistent interface could be defined across the enterprise.

2. Moving to the actual window that displays when the application is opened, a lot of the same concepts could be applied to the Interface Designer pane.

Attributes that could be set could include position on screen when opened, width and height of the window, and all the attributes of a dot Net form.  The same radio button strategy used for individual interface tools could be employed to use or not use system defaults.

3. In the UI, it would be nice if there was additional flexibility in how the interface tools could be laid out.  Along with the relative position of labels for each control, being able to layout controls horizontally as well as vertically would allow for a more organized interface.

 The Radio buttons would work as normal with the Text Box controls inside each Radio button and only displaying when the button is selected.

I realize a lot of the current development in Alteryx is focused on the new Alteryx Connect and being able to attach to more data files and services. But, if there is still also a concerted effort to move from what could be considered a legacy proprietary mark up language, pcxml, to a more robust and universally accepted mark up, html and css, then, in my humble opinion, expanding the options for developers to design more user friendly and customizable applications to a standard 'style' across the enterprise, both on the desktop and in the gallery, is a worthy endeavor.

Thanks for your attention.  More to follow.

Dan

Not sure what detail needs to be added.  This is obviously a widely used RDBMS.

Browse tool is really a powerful tool. We can see all information regarding datasets very rapidly.

Unfortunately, we only can export information (graphs, tables) manually through PNG files...

One major interest of Alteryx in Big Company is to perform DATA Quality reviews.

If we could export Browse tool informations (graphs, tables) automatically in pdf file or other solutions, we could save a lot of time in Data Quality tasks.

The only solution is to use DataViz tool or set up specific render in Alteryx (very time-consumming)

Main benefit would be the ability to share insights of DATA Quality with other business units.

Best Regards

We have a large SAS Programming team that keeps most of thier data sets in a Unix environment. A more robust ODBC connection to this data would greatly enhance our use of Alteryx. The current SAS odbc Driver tends to lock Alteryx up. Creating edits to the connection also tends to lock ateryx up to an unrecoveable point.

Hello all,

Despite a few limitations, Alteryx is great when you work with full table (i.e when you rewrite entirely the table). But in real life, very few workflows work like that :

Here are some real life use cases that should be easy to deal with on Alteryx  :

-delta on a key

-delta on a key + last record based on a date

-update records

-start_date and end_date for a value

etc



Best regards,

Simon

Currently we can't use any PaaS MongoDB products (MongoDB Atlas / CosmosDB) as Alteryx Gallery doesn't support SSL for connecting to the MongoDB back end.

SSL is good security practice when splitting the MongoDB onto a different machine too.

Connect to PowerPivot data model or an Atomsvc file 

Hi Team,

I would like to make some suggestions for future release. I am a big fan of the "retro" alteryx look and would like the option to select that look under User Settings. There should also be some other set themes for user to use. a "Light" version, "Dark" (for the true developer feel) and some grayscale standards or color blind adapted themes. 

I have a number of reservations to the new look design (I can put those in a separate post if the team really wants to hear them) but please put the 'retro' button in user settings for me and I will be a happy analyst.

Keep up the good work!!!

In an enterprise environment, or a reasonably sized BI team - you want a degree of consistency on how workflows look and feel.   This increases maintainability; portability; and also increases the safety (because like well structured source-code - it's easier to read, so it's easier to peer-review)

Looking at all the samples provided by Alteryx, they all have a similar template, which makes them very easy to use.

Could we add the capability for larger BI teams to create a default canvas template (or a set of templates) which enforce the company / team's style-guide; layout; and required look-and-feel?   

Thank you

Sean

As Tableau has continued to open more APIs with their product releases, it would be great if these could be exposed via Alteryx tools.

One specifically I think would make a great tool would be the Tableau Document API (link) which allows for things like:

- Getting connection information from data sources and workbooks (Server Name, Username, Database Name, Authentication Type, Connection Type)

- Updating connection information in workbooks and data sources (Server Name, Username, Database Name)

- Getting Field information from data sources and workbooks (Get all fields in a data source, Get all fields in use by certain sheets in a workbook)

For those of us that use Alteryx to automate much of our Tableau work, having an easy tool to read and write this info (instead of writing python script) would be beneficial.  

Hi, 

Standard In-DB connection configuration for PostgreSQL / Greenplum makes "Datastream-In" In-DB tool to load data line by line instead of using Bulk mode.

As a result, loading data in a In-DB stream is very slow.

Exemple

Connection configuration

Workflow

100 000 lines are sent to Greenplum using a "Datastream-in" In-DB tool.

This is a demo workflow, the In-DB stream could be more complex and not replaceable by an Output Data In-Memory.

Load time : 11 minutes.

It's slow and spam the database with insert for each lines.

However, there is a workaround.

We can configure a In-Memory connection using the bulk mode : 

And paste the connection string to the "write" tab of our In-DB Connection : 

Load time : 24 seconds.

It's fast as it uses the Bulk mode.

This workaround has been validated by Greenplum team but not by Alteryx support team.

Could you please support this workaround ? 

Tested on version 2021.3.3.63061

It would be great if the "fields from connected tool" option pulled fresh data at runtime when used in the gallery and pulling data from non-interface tools. The external source option doesn't have many settings (i.e. I can just point to one file), whereas the possibilities would be endless if I could use the full suite of tools to create a data set, at runtime, to pass to the list box/dropdown.

Hello,

A lot of time, I would like to manipulate data between my interface tool (let's say a dropdown or a control parameter) and the action tool.

This can be things like parsing (text to column..), regex, multifield, etc...

As of today, we can just write formula and this is really poor.

Best regards,

Simon

So many times, a given source field name could change. If you have a complex workflow it can be time consuming to update various join, select and other tools to replace the old field name with the new field name. For example in sales you may have fields that include the year  "Sales_2020".

It would be nice to "mimic" the functionality that Tableau provides where you can somehow click/select a field (e.g. Sales_2020) and then select "Replace Reference" and select the new field you want to use instead (e.g Sales_2021). This functionality would then automatically carry through the entire workflow and wherever you used Sales_2020 you will now automatically use Sales_2021.

Thoughts on this?

Configurable hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts would be awesome.  For instance, select/deselect highlighted fields or remove prefix are two commands that I use frequenctly but which are buried in menus.

Being able to assign hotkeys to favourite tools would be another time saver.  Imagine, ctrl-alt-F and a formula appears under the cursor!

Working across a large organisation inevitably leads to people using different drive letters when mapping drives/folders. This makes sharing workflows and macros with other teams more difficult and the first thing I do when creating a new workflow is change the dependencies to All UNC.

This suggestion is to offer the option to default all workflows to UNC via the user settings. Acknowledging that some users will prefer listing files by drive letter and other UNC, adding the option could make life a little bit easier for everyone.

Sometimes I will get the error "You have found a bug".  Could this include a link to a stack trace, or some diagnostics that might allow us to see what the problem is?  Or suggestions to turn on logging, perhaps? 

I understand that new users do not want to see stack traces, but Alteryx is a serious business tool and it should give users a chance to find workarounds, but for that we need more diagnostics.

Idea:

A tool for encryption/decription of a column with multiple encrypiton options is the idea.

Both one way and two way encription should be possible.

Rationale:

Clients are in need of encrypting customers' personal identification data

before sharing it with a third party like consultants and analytics service providers etc.

When insights are provided back the data owner needs to quickly decrypt the ID field and get results or decide actions.

Clients:

This is especially an important case for banks, non bank financial institutions and telecom companies in EU countries and similar (Turkey has similar strict rules)

Best