Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi team,

 

I have a set of data that contains functional mapping of cost centers of the organisation. Such mapping is maintained by an administrator in the system and he manages and modifies/add changes.

 

Administrator does not consider the case sensitivity and sometime may write the same function name in UPPER and Proper case say for example "OPERATIONS" and "Operations"

 

I need to use such mapping in a workflow where I need to extract unique function names from the mapping.

 

Since a function has more than one cost centers so there are multiple lines for a function name in the mapping. 

 

I used Unique tool to do this. But this tool has a limitation that it considers the case sensitivity and reads the same word written in different case type as two unique values.

 

So in my case the i got two lines for the same function - one in UPPER case i.e. "OPERATIONS" and other with Proper case i.e. "Operations"

 

In order to tackle this problem, I used formula tool to convert entire text in uniform case type and then applied Unique tool.

 

Suggestion : I suggest enhancing the Unique tool to give user an option to configure it to consider case sensitivity while selecting unique values from the data.

Currently the Find Window is the only one not located in the View menu. It would be great to have it located either just under view or under both Edit and View. Most users are aware of the other windows once they discover the View menu, however I feel they are missing a lot of the new features with the new Find Replace functionality available in the Find Window. One looking at it under the Edit window it just looks like a simple Find, not like a whole new window that can be used as part of your Designer experience.

 

All other window options are located here.

 

Current Position for Find

If an organisation wants many Designer users to have the same macros available to them, they have to set up their own network drive to save the macros to and share that drive to all users and ensure each user has read access to it and then maps that drive to their macros. 

 

Instead of relying on this shared drive architecture, macro builders should be able to publish their macros to a collection in Gallery and then end users should be able to map that collection to their Macros in Designer.

It would keep the sharing of macros within the Alteryx platform and make sharing macros much more intuitive and frictionless.

Its definately not a good UX that the full browse is now in the output window.  I usually have my Output on autohide and its a few extra clicks to see the browses now... Can we have both the Browse Everywhere tab in Output and Configuration Panel?

Most people who have been around for more than one version change of Alteryx will be familiar with the standard dreaded error pop-up box:

 

"There was an error opening [workflow X]. This workflow was created by a more recent version of Alteryx..."

 

The pop up box is generated as many times as there are assets potentially affected. You click once to acknowledge you're aware there is a problem with asset 1A, then you click again when the 1B pop up appears, then you keep clicking until you reach W76. Or that's what the software expects you to do and seem to figure is the graceful way to handle potential problems associated with missing assets (it's far from certain there are even any problems with running the specific code referred to on the older version, this is a warning-level notification where stuff might not work which has been 'promoted' to a full-fledged error that you are requested to address at the asset level). 

 

If you work somewhere where there is a large community of Alteryx users sharing assets widely with each other (all making use of large shared macro repositories) the software's choice of notifying you at the asset level is, not to mince words, completely insane. You could do everything right, have exactly the recommended version from the perspective of Alteryx sys-management, the one that corresponds to the corporate server version executing the scheduled workflows, and still be bombarded with 15 notifications at start-up if you're away for a few days and in the time you were away one or two new guys at the (very large) company decided to create a few new assets with the latest version of the software and share them with their colleagues (the latest version was not yet implemented server-side, so some of those tools might fail for those users - but the tools become everybody's problem the second they're stored in the shared location).

 

The notifications at startup make no distinction between relevant and irrelevant messages, you can start an empty new workflow and still get messages related to macros you don't care about, because they're located somewhere where Alteryx has been told to look for them even if they're not loaded/included in the workflow.

 

Every single asset Alteryx might in theory make use of during the session that is starting up will spark an individual message that cannot be ignored or skipped without acknowledging its existence, even if many of the assets will work just fine with an older version. This setup scales ...badly.

 

I can think of at least two solutions which would in many ways be preferable to the current structure. One would be to 'batch' the notifications prior to creating the pop-up box (one pop-up per start-up, not per asset). What might be included in such a pop-up could for instance be a grouped output with the Alteryx versions that did not match the active version ('workflows developed in version 'XX56' and 'XX57' were identified and these may fail to load', or whatever). Another option would be to have a setting in Designer where you tell Alteryx you don't want to see these notifications at start-up.

In the Test tool, the default is for the "don't report errors if there are other errors in the workflow" box to be checked. I think the default should be for it to be unchecked - it is very aggravating to think that you have found the problem with the workflow only for another to pop up.

Hi Alteryx -

 

It would be nice if we could include some of the sampling functions in the Input tool. For example, I am creating a random 10% sample from a large data set but in order to do this I need to first input the entire data set then create the sample. This takes processing time and effort.  Ideally, in the Input configuration I would like to see the option to create samples without having to load in the entire data set. Similar to Record Limit but with added functionality. 

 

Thanks, 

 

Derek 

It may be user-friendly to display the DSN description. It's usually stored in the windows registry under "description" :

 

 

This should display in the log and when you configure a connexion.

This would be much better than having to output the data to an Excel tab or csv file in order to link to Excel pivot tables.  The pivot tables could link directly to the yxdb files.

Hello all,

A whole field of performance improvement have not been explored by Alteryx : the hardware acceleration by using something else than a CPU for calculation.

Here some good readings about that :
https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/why-use-an-fpga-instead-of-a-cpu-or-gpu-b234cd4f309c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit

The kind of acceleration we can dream !

 

Right now the PublishToPowerBI connector only publishes to "My Workspace."  I manage datasets that feed reports for multiple workspaces, some of which are not necessarily personal workspaces (so there is no login associated). A drop-down that lets you select which workspace, that you are a member of, would be fantastic!

 

The workaround right now is to ETL in Alteryx then save the dataset out to OneDrive. You can then "Publish" the Excel sheet to Power BI natively, and the data refreshes once an hour. This works for some data, but we have use cases that need refresh rates much higher than that. Plus publishing directly to Power BI would be ideal.

I think it would be extremely beneficial to have the customization option to rearrange tools within their panels in the tool palette.

This would allow the user to group frequently used tools in their desired order, which would make navigation of these tools easier.

As an example, having the ability to place Data Input as the first tool in the palette would make a lot of sense to me, as its usually where I start building a new workflow.

It would be useful if the Tile Tool had an option to tile based on Natural Breaks in the data. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenks_natural_breaks_optimization

 

For example:

 

Value	TileValue
100	3
99	3
94	3
60	2
55	2
54	2
52	2
51	2
8	1

Hey all,

We have a policy (similar to the best practices guide published recently by the Copenhagen user group - thank you @danielbrun2) that Alteryx canvasses should run without warnings.

 

However - some of the warnings are tremendously painful to track down. For example - a union that brings together 20 or 30 input streams which gives you a warning saying "not all fields contain field X".

 

Can we change this to multiple warnings saying "Input X does not contain field X" so that we click straight through to the offending warning?

Additionally - when there's a conversion error - we then have to run the flow again with filters and diagnostics to find the offending row. Can we have a way that alteryx automatically sidelines an example row so that you can solve it in one pass?

 

If we look at all the warnings with the intention of "how do we make this something that can be solved right now, without having to run complex diagnostics, so that the very next run is 100% clean" that would be a big help.

 

Thank you Sean

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Inspire-2017-Buzz/24-Best-Practices-for-Moving-from-Ad-Hoc-Analysis...

 

It would be nice if this option would take you to the correct download page relative to the version the user has installed. Currently, this always loads the download page for the current version which is confusing for users of a company who are still required to use an older version.

 

 

In the new Intelligence Suite tools, it would be extremely useful to have the option to add n-gram (combining words/tokens ) in the Topic Modeling Text Mining Tool. 

 

This is important in many NLP topic modeling scenarios.

It would provide more flexibility to build better NLP models.

 

For details on n-gram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram

 

 

I have two use cases here:

1) A single tool that I want to connect to several tools (e.g. an input connecting to a number of selects)

2) Several tools that I want to connect to a single tool (e.g. several inputs connecting to a single union tool)

The current interface requires that I establish these connections by connecting the tools individually. It would be great to have the ability to have a right-click option. Simplistically, it might work something like this...

1) Select the tools that you want connected to a single tool (e.g. all the selects); Right-click; Get connection from Tool...{drop down list}

2) Select the tools that you want to get their connection from a single tool (e.g. all the inputs); Right-click; Connect to Tool...{drop down list}

With the Action Tool, if you use the "Update Value" action type, you have the ability to check the "Replace a specific string" option

 

If you use the "Update Value with Formula" action type, you no longer have the option to Replace a specific string.

 

Can't think of any reason why we should not have the ability to replace a specific string while using "Update value with formula"

 

Please can you add this in next release?

Table names seem very similar to named ranges in Excel. However, my workflow bombs when I try to read in a named table. Instead, I have to open the workbook, find the range of the table, and then type the range in the input tool. Alternatively, I could name the range that the table is in. However, I don't want to have a table name and a range name that are both referring to the same thing. So, I'd like to be able to read in a table I have in an excel workbook based on the name of the table. Does that make sense? Anything I can do to make the question clearer? Thank you!