Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

For example, allowing the letters in front of the column titles to be formatted differently to make them stand out on a report. 

As a Left-hander I use my Mouse in my Left hand and use my Right hand for keyboard short cuts.

In many windows products that means I can use the CTRL-INSERT, SHIFT+INSERT, SHIFT+DEL for copy, paste, and cut.

In Meta-info windows in Alteryx I can do this, but in the workflow windows I can not.  I'd like the functionality added.

I'd consider myself as a power user in most of the tools I use. No matter what program it is, I try to learn most of the useful shortcuts and code them into my mouse or keypad.

It's probably pretty uncommon that someone uses a mouse with 12 extra keys or a keypad, but I think many people would be happy to have the option to define shortcuts for everything. I don't really ask for shortcuts for everything by default, but a menu like Microsoft Word has it, that would be great.

For reference: 

Microsoft Word has a menu were nearly every possible action is listed and you are able to define/assign shortcuts (one or more) for every action available.

(Sorry it's German. Path: File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Customize)

My friend @jdunkerley79 posted a terse idea:  https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/FieldName-constant-in-Generate-Rows-Tools-an...  it is inactive, but I want to extend his thoughts.

Rephrasing his idea as mine:  The tool defaults the expressions to use [RowCount].  If you should either "Update Existing Field" or change the "Create New Field" the default expressions MUST be updated manually.  Please update the expressions to make use of the new field.

Well, that doesn't always work!  Often it will.  But if you change the TYPE to date, it certainly won't.  In fact, I see many questions about joining from within a DATE  RANGE and the technique to build date rows from the range requires the use of DateTimeAdd().  Wouldn't it be nice (like your sample workflows) to modify the default expression based on the change of data type?  I think so.

If we were thinking easy.  Suppose you could have a RANGE function (dates or numerics) where you simply selected the from, to fields and gave the user the option to select the units.  Now the tool auto-configures itself to create all of the "days" between the from and to dates or "1.0" and it creates all unit values between the two numeric amounts.

These would be "Alteryx" worthy enhancements in my opinion.

Cheers,

Mark

The following idea might not be as valuable as some of @SeanAdams posts, but it would save this user precious fractions of time.   When I leave the canvas with my mouse (point A) to go up to the pallet I select and drag the tool down to the canvas.  Sometimes I do right-click and go through the menus to add the next tool, but generally I go through that labor only when I'm inserting in-stream the tool.  So here is my idea:

Double-Click your NEXT tool and it "Alteryx-ly" appears on your canvas in proximity to the hi-lighted (last) tool.  Better yet, connect it!  Now I can move from the pallet to the configuration panel directly without having to move my mouse down to the canvas and then over to the configuration panel.

Hopefully, my friend @Hollingsworth will find this time-saving idea worthy of a star.  Speed demons like @NicoleJohnson and @BenMoss might not need this turbo boost, but at my age it is worth the ask.

Cheers,

Mark

Using the download tool is great and easy to use. However, if there was a connection problem with a request the workflow errors out. Having an option to not error out, ability to skip failed records, and retrying records that failed would be A LIFE CHANGER. Currently I have been using a Python tool to create multi-threaded requests and is proven to be time consuming.

Creation of a Multi Append Fields tool instead of having to use Multiple Append Fields to join man different columns.

I would like to suggest the functionality of converting an In-DB tool to Input Data automatically as it is done with Input Data so that it becomes an automatic Macro input.

The reverse would also be interesting, converting the Input Data, when it is connected to the database, to In-DB.

When using the equal sum option in the Tile tool, you have the choice to sort by a column. However, it's not clear from the tool whether the data is being sorted in ascending or descending order.

Confusingly, the data is sorted in descending order, compared to the default of ascending in the Sort tool. This seems counterintuitive, as a user would expect the same defaults across tools (we did! and it caused some consternation when we worked out it wasn't) and also because in most of our use cases, you want the highest tile to be the highest rank, e.g., if you were sorting households by income.

I have two possible suggestions:

     1. Update the tool properties so that it reads "Sort column (descending)". (Probably the easiest change!)

     2. Allow the user to specify a direction with another drop down that becomes active when you select a sort field (similar to the sort tool).

I know that the functionality of suggestion 2 is available by adding a Sort tool before the Tile and sorting the data in ascending order. However, having to do that every time seems to defeat the point of being able to sort in the Tile tool.

Thanks for reading!

Jason

Standard Tile configuration:

Option 1 (mock-up):

Option 2 (mock-up):

I am trying to generate the multiple sheets in the same Excel using Render tool. one of the sheet having around 100 columns and other two sheets are having only 20 columns. If am configuring paper size to 50 inches in render tool, its affecting the other sheets too and Report doesn't look good since columns width are getting extended to some extent. 

So, it will more helpful if there is an option to configure each sheet paper size or a rule kind of thing.

Please let me know if there are any option to that.

Thanks in advance... 

Hi Alteryx Designer Dev Team,

There are times where you want to create a variation of a particular pipeline and the data transformations in the beginning of the pipeline are similar but need slightly different configurations. To save time, can we have a right-click context option for each tool to be able to copy/paste or duplicate tool with existing configuration. This saves time by only having to change a few options in the duplicated tool. This is common for tools like, input, output, joins, groupings and reporting tools. An example where this functionality is handy in reporting: you may have a particular way that you always do your charts and instead of configuring the chart options from scratch each time, you copy paste the chart tool with current configuration and then you only have to make minor changes such as the data connections. 

Thank you

my company utilizes a lot of power pivot, but I am not seeing this as an available data source. Could this be implemented so that we could seamlessly incorporate our existing power pivot tools into ALteryx workflows?

I'd like to see the DateTimeLastOfMonth and DateTimeFirstOfMonth functions be more flexible then just getting the first or last date of the current month. It would be great if you could point to a date field and have it give the first or last date of that month. i.e  DateTimeLastOfMonth([randomdate]) and if the [randomdate] = December 3rd, 1981, the result would bring back 1981-12-31

Hello,

It would be helpful if some of your tools had an optional input.  For example, the directory tool is of course very helpful at the beginning of a workflow, however I have several workflows that create or pull in files, rename them, edit them, etc.  I then need the directory tool to check that folder for the newly created files and then to feed that downstream.  The problem is that when I have the directory tool feeding into the workflow, it fires immediately noting that no files are in the folder.  I would love if the tool had an optional input so you could choose to put it in the middle of a workflow in an attempt to force it to hold off on firing until its turn.

Even better would be if the dynamic directory tool would allow for dynamic folders to be fed in rather than pinpointing a specific file....since it has an input, that would suffice and the user could either pick the regular directory or the dynamic directory if they wanted it to fire off in the middle of a workflow.

Hello,

I am using google analytics connector (v7.0.7) with alteryx  designer version 2019.4. I am using online option to sign in and able to extract required dimensions and metrics but when it gets disconnected, I have to select everything again.

That would be very helpful if  I can simply save my settings with selected dimensions, metrics and segments etc.

Thanks 

It seems like it is restricted to 255 characters using .hyper as an input (Alteryx designer discussion).  It would be great if we can read at least 2147483648 bytes which is the string limitation in Alteryx.

I would love to see an optional output anker for the render tool.

This would allow us to push a pdf/png into the python module. We could then build twitter/social media 'add ons' using python and fully automize the process.

When using Interactive Chart tool; or Insight tool - every time you click on it you are asked to configure, even if you've already configured this previously.

Please could you change this so that it displays the "Configure this tool" screen ONLY if there is no configuration in place.

This tool is already configured, but still you get the "configure this tool" dialogYou can see here that there is configuration already (looking at the XML)You can also see that this tool is already configured if you look at the config itself

the SQL Editing screen has recently been changed (thank you @jpoz  and team!) - and now has syntax indenting and keyword coloring.

Could I ask for a minor change:

- The tool seems to be doing a word-wrap even if the container doesn't need it - for example in the screenshot below, the entire on clause can fit on one line because I've expanded the window so that it doesn't need to wrap.

- Could you also default to putting the ON clause for a join 4 spaces indented underneath the join clause?   worked example below.

Wordwrap:

Indenting Structure:

Could we use a default structure for queries where the on part is indented underneath the Join?

Select

    Field1,

    Field2,

    field3

from

    Table1

    inner join table2

        On Table1.key = table2.key

        and table1.keyb = table2.keyb

    inner join table3

        on table3.key = table1.key

        and table3.date = table1.date