Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I always get a chuckle out of seeing PowerPoint presentations which, through numerous tables and illustrations show the "health" of "x" - where "x" is a customer, a market, business division, etc. - where the author spent hours creating graphical indicators such as arrows to render trends.

Recalling being provided such a deck from a senior leader who was touting how precisely the deck drew attention to areas of needed action.  The deck, in this case, was a 6 figure investment from a consulting firm. My unwelcomed response was, "Pretty pictures, nice illustrations.  What happens when business shifts tomorrow and we need to see this updated?"  There was no response.

In a different past life, I had the opportunity to create a similar deck, but utilized PowerPoint's ability to link to Excel, and VBA that made the tables graphs - and trending arrows all dynamic based on the data.  

This feature request, however, is not about me.  The dynamic slide deck solution was a windfall.  Alteryx workflows can certainly push dynamic data into .xlsm files to lighten the burden on the .xslm by eliminating the data pull.

BUT - not many organizations care for having production .xlsm files in use, and they're difficult to governance control.

Would be GREAT if one of Alteryx's output options was:  A PowerPoint

Give the developer the same ability to render "pages" as one would to populate Worksheets in a Workbook.

Have to believe would be a game changer for the product.

I would like a new format option within the Designer function DateTimeFormat such that where a date is held in the database

e.g. 2023-01-01

DateTimeFormat([date],%o)

will return 1st not 1 or 01. 

Workarounds exist, but are fiddly given the different options....1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.....

Up to version 10.0 I could open pretty much all analytics tools as a macro, to tweak things in R or in the macro workflow to get the results in a way most useful to us.

But apparently with Alteryx 11.0 the newer tools does not have that option, Although we can still access the older versions of those tools and still open them as macro but I don't understand (may be because they have interactive report option) why that is being killed in the newer versions? 

Most of the newer versions have new features, like Linear Regression now support elastic net and cross validation etc.. but I still want to be able to go in to them to tweak them.

Spark ODBC is really faster than Hive, at least for GUI.

However, two things are missing :
1/ Append existing for the write date (exists his way on Hive)

2/ability to put "overwrite" even if the table does not exist (it works this way on Hive)

These two drawbacks limit severly th

I am suggesting an addition to the Auto Field Tool.  Create an option that allows only auto sizing of the fields and does not change the field type.  A check box that says Auto Size Only.  The tool would recognize any fields that can be resized based on their incoming data field type and will not change the data type.  The resizing function is very helpful to maximize workflow performance, but I currently do not use it much because it guesses wrong on the data types.  This causes problems also when data inputs change.  Whereas setting to auto size only, it can streamline the data but let the user be confident the data types would not change. 

Thank You

Data profiling feature in the Browse tool is a great feature, however, when your working with an extremely large data set, it can a large amount of time to fully render.

My idea is if Alteryx can make a pre-determination whether the data is so large that it'll take a substantial amount of time to profile the data. If it does, to not profile immediately, rather, display a message where the profile info would be letting the user know that it may take a while to generate with a "Generate Profile" button if the user needs to see it.

Another option would be to only profile a sample of the data and present the user an option to profile everything.

Thanks,

Jimmy

The Explorer tool looks glitchy when you initially drop it on the canvas and I think its because it is trying to access the internet.  We already have temp folders in the Alteryx programs folder and it would be cool if the initial file reference is local- so its FAST.  

I have tried to search for this Idea but not located one that is same or similar. 

When searching for tools to use rather than having to click in the search bar at the top, it would be nice just to click on a blank part of the canvas and start typing for the tool that you need, then a suggest tool list pops up and you just click on the one you want to it appear. 

Thanks

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.

Microsoft Access 2000-2003 does not access big integer

Integer — For integers that range from -32,768 to +32,767. Storage requirement is two bytes.

You can find MS documentation here : https://support.office.com/en-us/article/set-the-field-size-ba65e5a7-2e6f-4737-8e72-36b93f966a33

So when you use Alteryx with big integer (e.g Int64 ), it won't work the way you expected and the field will be converted into Double.

So what I propose :

-a change in documentation about this behaviour
-a warning message on the output box when you use Access and you have Int64

-ability to select Access 2016 in order to use Long integer format

Best regards,

Simon

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.

Create a tool that allows user to create calculated fields for Tableau to output along with a .tde so they are available when openning the tde.  

There are several situations where precalculated materialized data will visualize inaccurately in Tableau and calcualted fields need to be used.

• 1:* measures - Fixed Lod expersions for selected measures
• Count Distinct
• Percentages and Ratios

When working with R code and errors occur, the application needs to show which line the error happened on.

As a change to Designer UI in 2021.2, when in the filter box, I used to be able to use my mouse to click a little X in the corner to clear the filter or sort that had been implemented and it would immediately clear the filter.  It's not working as of 2021.2.  Now, I must navigate to the last cascade to get to the word Clear and click on it to clear the filter. 

This feels like another very tiny move in the wrong direction. These small UI changes cause 2 or 3 additional steps and slow the diagnostic/navigation process in moving around the Results Grid in the Browse Tool or at any point in the flow where the Results Grid is used.

Can the X in the top level of the Filter/Sort box in the Results Grid be restored in 2021.2?

Related to submission:

Small fix for the UI in the Results Grid (or Browse Tool)

Small Keyboard fix for the browse tool's filter

Recursion is a common task that we perform while creating ETL process. There should be some way in the macro to allow recursion process, i.e. taking value from the output in macro and providing it as input to the control parameter. 

Adding this feature could improve ETL capabilities within Alteryx

It seems odd to me that Alteryx has so many connectors for complex data sources but lacks a built-in tool for standard FTP and SFTP which is arguably the most common external data source of all.

I've searched around the community and of course there are all kinds of methods involving using the download tool or command line, but all these require quite a bit of setup and advanced understanding.  Why not just setup a built-in tool for FTP that would allow users to easily download and upload to FTP?

Alteryx is all about simplicity and democratization of the data shaping role, so the need for a simple FTP tool seems key to that product vision.  Thanks for considering...

Hi,

we use a lot the in-db tools to join our database and filter before extracting (seems logic), but to do it dynamically we have to use the dynamic input in db, which allows to input a kind of parameter for the dates, calculated locally and easily or even based on a parameter table in excel or whatever, it would be great to be able to dynamically plug a not in db tools to be able to have some parameters for filters or for the connect in-db. The thing is when yu use dynamic input in-db, you loose the code-free part and it can be harder to maintain for non sql users who are just used to do simple queries.

You could say that an analytic application could do the trick or even developp a macro to do so, but it would be complicated to do so with hundreds of tables.

Hope it will be interesting for others!

it would be great to have an Azure SQL DB or/and Azure SQL DW Connector. In the moment it is only possible to connect with the Standard SQL Db connector. To be successful a username and password is always required.

It would be perfect, if you can use your Azure AD User and Password and connect against the relevant Database within the Azure environment.