Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently both the formula and summarise tools round to 6.d.p for finance calculations such as IRR. People coming from Excel will be used to a higher precision then this. It would be great to up the precision in line with other platforms to 8.d.p +

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.

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.

Hello,

  could you improve the sample tool to able it using a variable ?

  For exemple : the user could use a variable instead for "N".

  Thank you

  Kévin V.

It would be awesome if the Filter tool pre-populated info from your data so you could select what you want to filter by vs having to type it into a text field. When I filter data, I sometimes don't recall the exact word I'm needing to filter by. For example, if I'm needing to filter results for all Ground Operations data in the department column, I may have to look at the data to see if it's called Ground Operations, Ground Ops, GO, etc. I find myself having to use a summarize tool to see the different words in a specific field so I know how to specify it in the filter tool. 

My proposal is that the Filter tool displays all data options in the field for which you're filtering. So, if you're filtering the department field and there's 10 different departments in your data, those departments could display as selectable options in a dropdown menu.

Here's my example:

I want to filter for "Safety & Security" in the "medtype_name" field.

But, I don't remember if it is spelled with an ampersand or the word "and" or if it's abbreviated. I would have to look through the data in this column to find the specific way this word is listed so I know exactly how to write it in the filter tool. But if there are thousands of records, it would be hard to scroll through everything. So, I add a Summarize tool to group the different data points in this field. Then it is easy for me to scroll and find the one I'm looking for. Now I know exactly how to type the term into the Filter tool.

My idea is that the Filter tool does the work of the Summarize tool in that all data points in the specific field are shown in a dropdown, and you just select the one you want to filter by instead of having to write it in the text box. 

I searched but didn't see this idea, so please forgive me if it's already been mentioned.

Can get the global search to include the Toolkits? They are currently not in the Alteryx community pages and are extremely useful for helping people get started. They are located https://www.alteryx.com/analytic-starter-kits , which seems to be outside the realm of the global search. 

Sometimes when creating a workflow, or a chained application I create fields or parameters in a formula tool and need to be able to quickly copy and paste the entire formula output column into another formula tool across a different part of the workflow / entirely different workflow.

This most often happens when standardizing fields across different data streams. We have the ability to save expressions, but if you save too many that can quickly get messy. We also have the ability to copy and paste a formula within a formula output column...so why not extended the functionality slightly to copy/paste the entire formula output column?

In this proposed enhancement a user could right click on the 3 lines at the top left of the formula section and copy/cut a formula output column between formula tools:

In Render tool you can use a field to group by and use that field to alter the output file name somewhat similar to the output tool.  Unfortunately it is not exactly like the output tool.  Usually you have a table tool and or layout or visual layout tool before the Render.  In my most recent scenario I have several outputs I use the Table tool for to format, the text tool to generate headings and the visual layout tool to organize these headings and tables into coherent sections on a final output used as a dashboard. 

Fine and dandy except a new requirement now divides these data based on client so I tried to find a way to pass the Client code through to the Render tool so it could dynamically alter the output file so each client gets their version without manually creating multiple replicated streams to format.  But the Render tool requires a field and if I am passing a table it can't reference columns (fields) within the table and if I build a client code field to pass outside the table I can't seem to find a way to tag it to the table  and text going into the layout or in some way pass it into the layout tool in a meaningful way to reach the Render tool for use in dynamic rename of output file.

I wish there was a way to pass a field into the Render tool to modify output file name whether feeding it tables or other data or mixed elements.  Maybe a pass through element or something?

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 

The regular filter tool is great because I get the true and false returns. When doing ad-hoc analytics it would be super helpful if the date filter did the same thing.

In the example below, I had to create an "IF" statement that returned a T/F value and then fitler out based on the output of that formula.

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

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) 

In the previous tools the information lab had build for publishing to Tableau server, they had the incremental TDE refresh option available. I would like to see that included in the Publish to Tableau Server Macro. We often just want to add previous day data to a YTD data extract without running the full data set from our Datawarehouse. The full set takes long and a daily increment / add only would take a couple minutes.

I understand that Server and Designer + Scheduler versions have the option to "cancel workflows running longer than X”.

I'd like to see that functionality in the desktop edition as well.

I find that to do a simple concatenation of multiple fields, it takes multiple tools where it seems one would suffice. For example, if I had an address parsed into multiple fields (House Number, Street, Apt, City, State, Zip Code, Country), to combine these into a single address field, I'd have two options: Formula that manually adds each field with +' '+ in between each field, which is a lot of typing and selecting...Or Transpose data and then Summarize (concatenating) the values field with a space delimiter between each record.
 
Seems to me that a simpler solution would be a concatenate tool that might look and feel much like the Select tool, allowing you to choose a name for your concatenated string, input a delimiter, select the fields to concatenate, and re-order them within the tool. Bonus if it automatically converted everything to string fields (or at least allows you to designate whether you want to concatenate all your fields as numbers or strings, and then translates accordingly). Extra bonus if you also had the option to put a different delimiter after every field...
 
Not a super complex thing to do this task with the given tools, but it does seem like a fairly straightforward add that would likely save a whole bunch of folks at least a few minutes here and there.

Hello!
Currently when using the DateTime and Text Pre-processing tool (I'm sure there are a few others), the default option is to have a new column as the output. For instance with DateTime:

There is no option to replace original field, simply create a new field. Setting the name as the same, will result in:

and with the Text-Preprocessing:
There is no option to specify an output column. The column you process, will become [field]_processed:

It would be awesome if both of these tools had functionality similar to the Multi-Row formula, with the ability to create a new field, or update existing field:

This would reduce data redundancy and need for additional select tools. Additionally with the Text Pre-Processing tool specifically, its very easy to make the mistake of not using the 'processed' field in future text based analysis, especially when the pre-processing tool is inserted into an already built connection.


Thanks,
TheOC

Autofield is useful in the creation of a workflow.  Autofield consumes energy otherwise.  The AutoField functionality could Automagically have a convert to SELECT functionality so that once the ideal metadata is constructed that a SELECT tool could replace the AutoField.  Typically, when I autofield, I add a SELECT tool and then remove the autofield.

Another use case for Autofield is after reading in a CSV or after text to columns.  Having a smart option for parsing avoids the need to use this particular tool. 

Again, it is useful to have, just not useful to run on each workflow execution.

Cheers,

Mark

I would like to see a way to partially execute  a workflow (specifically for an App) for the purposes of allowing user to make selections based on a dynamic data flow.

Ex:

1. Database Selection Interface

Click Next

2. Select from available columns to pass through to the output file.

Click Next

3. Pick from selected fields which fields should be pivoted.

Output file and complete run time

This was a simple example to explain a case, but the most common use I could see is for APIs.