Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Whilst the "Disable All Tools that Write Output" option within the Runtime Settings in Designer is useful.

I think a Workflow "Live" status / indicator could be really useful?

One key thing we have to seriously remind people whenever they start using Designer, especially when they are potentially picking up a workflow that some else has built is to sternly remind them that they need to understand the workflow outputs properly before pushing the run button!

One thing we do to get this message across is to demo the disable outputs option.

What would be better is to have some kind of interface / visual similar to the browse tool visuals that are created. But within the canvas / workflow / runtime config window?

This would instantly draw users attention to the fact that the workflow is connected to live outputs and that they should proceed with caution / turn off outputs etc. 

Hi 

I think its super frustrating not beeing able to search for dates, or date ranges in the result window.

Lets say I have a dataset with 2 dates, date picked up and date delivered.

Then I need to search broad in the result window, for a given date. With search in both coloumns.

Could we please have a simple specific date search, and maybe a from-to date? Like in the filter?


Or go all the way and look at excel date filter?

Kind regards

I have a PDF of 27 pages and each page is identical.  The headers, footers and data are static in positioning on each page. It would be great if I could define the text to parse out on the first page, then that could be used to parse out all of the pages in the PDF.  It would make the tool far more useful.

So - given the importance of Macros - it would be valuable to have the ability within Alteryx to generate a test harness with test data that ships with the macro (this way you can maintain and enforce regression testing)

For example:

- Macro that takes in 2 numbers and adds them

- Alteryx would look at the Macro to determine the input types, output types (in this case - two integers; with an integer output)

- Based on this, it could walk you through creating a fairly robust test harness that allowed the user to specify a set of inputs, and prompt you to also include things like blanks; negatives; etc (boundary values; deliberately destructive values like % or ' signs in strings; etc)

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.

Recently my trial license expired, and after receiving our activation licenses, I needed to upgrade from the 'User' version to the 'Admin' version.

When uninstalling the previous 'User' version, it appeared to complete successfully, and I then started installing the 'Admin' version from the installer.

After installation completed, I noticed that three versions of Alteryx appeared in my Windows 'Programs and Features' in Control Panel - Alteryx (Remove Only), Alteryx (Admin), and Alteryx (User).

When attempting to uninstall the 'User' version, it appeared to complete as expected, but did nothing when examining the application or root directory location, and I could still access and open and use the 'User' version of Alteryx.

To make a long story short, after going into regedit and removing all registry keys named 'Alteryx' including the SRC source key for Alteryx, I was able to manually remove all three of these versions and reinstall the 'Admin' application successfully.

Some kind of an uninstaller to wipe out all Alteryx directories, installations/versions, etc. to perform a clean uninstall/reinstall would be super valuable and probably save some folks a ton of time who are evaluating the product and moving from a Trial(User) version to an activated Admin license.

I have a use case where I am transitioning workflows to someone - 

One workflow leverages the outputs of one workflow as inputs in to another - it would be awesome if I could include a link on a tool or comment box that would automatically open the exact output tool. Right now I am taking pictures and mentioning the names of files and tool-ids. Seems like it would be an easier way. 

Hello,

Today I worked with summarize tool and need to merge/concatenate 10 string columns of dataset with different separator than is set up by default (",")

Current status is that you can multiple select columns that you want to concatenate (that's good) but when you want to set up for all output columns different separator than default, you must set up it for each column, in my case it was 10 columns..

one field is selected (Concatenate option is available)

More fields selected (Concatenate option is hidden)

My idea

Allow to multiple selection of fields that are concatenated and allow to set up separator for these fields. Benefit will be that you can mass setup different separator for various fields

For those of us dealing with mail files, it would be nice to be able to run presort discounts, but we need the following CASS fields for those discounts:

Line of Travel, Ascending/Descending Code & Walk Sequence.

As @Jonathan-Sherman pointed out in his blog post we love that the toolbar is back in version 2020.2!

One way that this toolbar could be enhanced, however, is to allow the use of the save button while a workflow is running. The user can still click File->Save while the workflow is running, but it would be quicker to be able to use the button on the toolbar.

I have a dual monitor setup. My canvas lives on the left monitor, and I combine tool config and results on the right monitor. I've noticed that it's incredibly difficult to resize the config vs results window size. This is because you have to hover over EXACTLY the right part of the divider until the resize icon appears, as below:

The difficulty arises because the target zone, over which the cursor changes from an arrow to the resize tool, is only 1 pixel wide. If you have a high resolution screen, or a slightly fiddly mouse, it's almost impossible to successfully hover over the correct place. Please consider increasing the width of the hover zone to facilitate window resizing. I hope I've explained this adequately, please let me know if I need to amend. Thanks!

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.

Good afternoon,

If any one of you have had to create Column Rules in the Table Tool for multiple Table Tools you'll know how much of a pain it is to set the same rules over and over and over.

It would be an amazing addition if we had the functionality to copy column rules to apply to other Table Tools.

What are yalls thoughts?

-Nick

Example1

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.

When utilizing the alteryx 'publish to tableau server' tool, only the name of the folder (project name) is visible for selection of where to publish the .hyper file on the tableau server.  When there are multiple folders with the same name under different parent folders, i.e. a 'weekly updates' folder under North America parent, a weekly updates folder under South America parent, etc... there is no way to differentiate between the 'weekly updates' folders in the tableau publish tool. 

In this case, you essentially have to publish test files to all the folders and write the results on a piece of paper for future reference.  

This request is to enable the navigation, or at least view, of a hierarchical folder structure within the 'publish to tableau server' tool.  

I was asked by a client @brianvigus to help him put the current date onto a daily Excel output file.  When they tried to prepend/append the date, it only would do so to the worksheet name and not to the workbook name.  I do like the ability to update the table (worksheet) name and understand their desire to update the workbook name too.

My solution was to create a COMPLETE PATH\FILENAME|SHEETNAME data element and use the existing option to change the entire file path.  That works.

I don't know if the solution to this idea is to update the help instructions to explain that table renames act differently than file renames or if the solution requires more functional options on append/prepend.

Thanks,

Mark

As we begin to adopt the AMP engine - one of the key questions in every user's mind will be "How do I know I'm going to get the same outcome"

One of the easiest ways to build confidence in AMP - and also to get some examples back to Alteryx where there are differences is to allow users to run both in parallel and compare the differences - and then have an easy process that allows users to submit issues to the team.

For example:

• Instead of the option being run in AMP or run in E1 - instead can we have a 3rd option called "Run in comparison mode"
• This runs the process in both AMP and E1; and checks for differences and points them out to the user in a differences repot that comes up after the run.
• Where there's a difference that seems like a bug (not just a sorting difference but something more material) - the user then has a button that they can use to "Submit to Alteryx for further investigation".    This will make it much simpler for Alteryx to identify any new issues; and much simpler for users to report these issues (meaning that more people will be likely to do it since it's easier).

The benefit of this is that not only will it make users more comfortable with AMP (since they will see that in most cases there are no difference); it will also give them training on the differences in AMP vs. E1 to make the transition easier; and finally where there are real differences - this will make the process of getting this critical info to Alteryx much easier and more streamlined since the "Submit to Alteryx" process can capture all the info that Alteryx need like your machine; version number etc; and do this automatically without taxing the user.

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.

Now that Alteryx releases updates to Designer every quarter I'll likely be updating my copy of Designer frequently. Meanwhile, my IT team doesn't want to have to update Server every quarter to stay compatible. Problem there is, when I create workflows in the latest version of Designer they can't run on the older version of Server, nor on the Gallery. 

Some features that would allow me to work around this: 

1. If I could elect what version I want to use when uploading to the gallery. 
2. If instead of having to upload workflows from within Designer (which thereby opens  the workflow in whatever version I have installed on my machine) I could upload workflows from the Gallery website by navigating to a folder on my directory and selecting a given workflow. That way I could open the workflow in Notepad beforehand and alter the version number to match Server. 

I'm guessing this is a niche problem that few others will encounter: 

1. Not everyone is as big a nerd as me and will insist on updating Designer each quarter
2. Other companies may have IT teams that update Server each quarter
3. You can install an admin and non-admin version of Alteryx on your machine (I plan on doing this once IT responds to my internal service request).
   1. You could use the admin version for the latest and greatest version of Alteryx
   2. You could use the non-admin version to match whatever version of Server IT has installed and use that to upload (first opening the workflow in notepad to manually overwrite the version number to match server)