Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It seems that version 10.6 (still in beta) will have easy to use linear programming tool... We'll be able to allocate assets optimally, optimize our marketing decisions by inputting the predictions we had with predictive tools etc.

 

But when it comes to Non-linear models what happens? The idea is to add Alteryx designer an evolutionary optimization capability as well...

 

I've used a similar tool in excel which was very useful called Evolver; http://www.palisade.com/evolver/ It will be awesome to see that in the coming versions...

To note that one optimisation method does not rule them all and evolutionary algorithms are the slowest probably,

But I believe it will enable us to optimize hyperparameters of our models and greatly get better results...

 

 

Hi there,

Apologies if Alteryx already does this - but I'd be curious to see if it would be possible to automatically add items to your favourites bar based on usage.

 

To test this, I've been doing a lot of macro work over the last few days, and given the frequency of using the Macro input and Macro output, I'd expect that they would have elected themselves onto my favourites list.

 

 

Again, apologies if the designer already does this

Sean

 

Often we run into two pretty common situations:

• You want to move a Select, Formula, or Filter to a different point in your workflow
• You want to remove a tool entirely, without affecting the workflow in any other way.

In both cases, I would prefer that I can set the default behaviour of ctrl-x or delete like the way 'Delete and connect around' behaves.

 

Thanks,

Ruud

Sometimes I get conversion error messages or warnings that really don't matter, and it would be great if there was a function similar to spell check or grammer check where I could say "Don't show me this again", so that once I've read the message I can choose whether or that particular message pops up again.

Hi,

 

I wasted a good old chunk of time dealing with non-breaking spaces, and Alteryx could be improved by handling this automatically.

 

A space is a space, right?  Nope, there are spaces (ASCII value decimal 32) and there are non-breaking spaces (ASCII value decimal 160).  They look the same, but have slightly different behaviour in certain circumstances, like when text is auto-wrapped.

 

The DataCleansing tool cleans spaces, but leaves non-breaking spaces.

The Data Grid puts a warning on cells with leading or trailing spaces, but remains silent for non-breaking spaces.

 

I was trying to match two strings, that looked identical.  I had DataCleansed my cells, and the grid was showing me nothing wrong with the data.  In desperation, I copied the two data cells that I expected to match to a text editor (Textpad), and then examined the binary ASCII values of the data.  One cell had a trailing non-breaking space, and that caused the failure to match.

 

This was hard to find.  For someone less hopelessly nerdy, it would be practically impossible. 

 

As a small change, it might be really useful for Alteryx to include non-breaking spaces in it's definition of "space", such that DataCleansing tool removes it, and the Data Grid flags up the cell as having a leading or trailing space.

 

You could pick up non-breaking spaces from HTML, or from Excel.  I think mine came from a SQL script but I am not sure how it was there.  They are out there, and they will bite.

I know this has been suggested before, but it would be great if calculations and transformations could be cached between workflow executions.  Perhaps the browse tools could be configured as caches.  Any spot that has a browse tool fixes the value of that node between runs provided that there are no upstream tool changes. The cache could be optional (or flushed) to allow for dynamic input data that could change between executions, even if the tool chain didn't.

In the Formula Tool, there is an Average() function which can be used to take the average/mean of multiple columns or expressions. This function treats null values as zeroes. This was a surprise/dissapointment to me as I am used to other applications & systems where nulls are ignored, for example Excel. It would be useful to have either an AverageIgnoreNulls() function or an optional extra parameter to Average() which specifies that nulls should be ignored rather than treated as zeroes.

 

When wishing to average a small number of columns and ignore nulls, a formula can be constructed using Iif(IsNull([Column1]),0,[Column1]) for each column to calculate the total, and Iif(IsNull([Column1]),0,1) for calculating the count. This quickly becomes unwieldy for more than 2 or 3 columns.

I recently did some extensive work on using the download tool to invoke Restful Web Services. A lot of the initial effort was around ensuring that the data being passed in the header and body for the request was as the service required. Following review of experiences on the community I used a tool called Fiddler to directly view what was being sent to identify the problems in my transformations of the data going into the Download tool. The idea is that the raw HTTP request and reply messages are available directly in Alteryx in the Results window when running a workflow, preventing the need to use another tool.

Alteryx does not currently have to email tool that is configurable to use SMTP Authentication for Microsoft Office 365 or any server requiring authentication.  Our office printer can authenticate over SMTP and with TLS enabled why not my Alteryx mail tool - 'mic drop!'. 

 

Further explained, Alteryx is a tool that needs to live within abide by the policies and security standards in the organization not vice versa.  Therefore, it shouldn't be a big surprise, or a big ask for that matter, that a mail client should have the ability to authenticate prior to sending email of SMTP.   I'm very surprised this tool is so arcane.  Please implement quickly.  Thank you

Sometimes I want to copy just the Name and Type fields from the metadata in the Results window. Even when selecting this option, however, all 5 available fields still get copied and pasted. I would like to see this change to work as expected and only copy those cells selected.

 

Copy only the first two columns

 

All of them get pasted

 

Cc @DultonM 

It seems that currently the Python tool is raising a `FileNotFoundError` exception in Python when there is not data incoming on an input connection. I have, for example, a Filter tool before the Python tool and sometimes there is just no data coming to Python tool - as it is intended.

 

Unfortunately, the Python tools gives my an error message in those cases with this message before the error:

 

This is only the case when there is no data incoming. In all other cases, the tool works fine.

 

Since this is not really an error, a way to either catch this before using `Alteryx.read("#1")` or just having `Alteryx.read()` return an empty data.frame (as I would expect it to do) would be appreciated.

To embed the "Not ok" filter option in the browse tool

 

It would be cool to have annotations that dynamically update.  E.g. a record count would be displayed in the annotation and update after a run if changes occurred.

My use case is simple. I place an explorer tool on the canvas pointed to a local htm file. During the workflow run, I update the htm file and want to update the canvas to display the results.

Cheers,
Mark

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. 

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 

Looking for a tool to replicate the Goal seek functionality built into Excel.

Seems it could be solved by using R or iterative macros however a tool would make life much easier,

Hi currently the s3 upload tool only allows file format of *.yxdb , *.json, *.csv and *.avro

 

In order to optimize loading to redshift, it would be good to have a few more functions

1. Ability to s3 upload with *.gz format

eg: Reading in a file using the input tool -> s3 upload tool (which has a gzip function with the following options - record limit, delimiter, UTF8)  

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/t_loading-gzip-compressed-data-files-from-S3.html

2. Change max record limit, delimiter, UTF8 format

3. Change the objectName to 'take file/table name from field' with filename containing filename or part of filename similar to the 'Output tool'

 

Adrian