Bring your best ideas to the AI Use Case Contest! Enter to win 40 hours of expert engineering support and bring your vision to life using the powerful combination of Alteryx + AI. Learn more now, or go straight to the submission form.
Start Free Trial

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Featured Ideas

Alteryx started as a geospatial application. The "y" and "x" in Alteryx stand for the geospatial origin of the application. So why doesn't every tool in the Spatial Category have a One Tool Example? As of version 2019.2.7, there is only one One Tool Example in the Spatial Category. It is for the Distance Tool.

 

Please make One Tool Examples for every Spatial tool. Thank you.

A multifilter tool would match excel capabilities and make users more comfortable making leap to Alteryx from excel/.

 

I pull alot of excel and text files through Alteryx; the files always have empty rows that make viewing the files through Alteryx unwieldy.  It is easy to filter one at a time but that is laborious,.  I put a post out to the community and others encountered same issue.  There was a macro built to bring this capability to Alteryx; it really should be a native feature.  I would rather not have to use a macro

 

Users in excel do sumifs, countifs where multiple fields are pulled into the formula.  The current filter tool in Alteryx only considers one column.  To match excel, the ability to bring multiple columns into the filter tool at once would match this capability.

 

Thanks,

 

Stan Grabish

(404) 925-3013

 

 

 

 

0 Likes
Please add the ability to minimize Alteryx during loading as well as minimize the app. I would like to do other tasks while Alteryx is loading. However, it operates as its more important than other applications and can not be minimized. Additionally, it would be nice to hide/minimize the app.

Hey all,

 

I would love to be able to have an interface tool that allows a user to search through drop down values (when there are more than 100 or so) similar to autocomplete. It would be helpful as a multiselect or single select drop down. I have inserted a very poorly mocked up picture below. It would essentially be a modified version of the drop down as all the values would be in the tool, but the user could type to find what they are looking for.

Alteryx Idea - Searchable Drop Down.png

As a developer I want to Cache & Run all/selected inputs in a Workflow with one command. Maybe even with a keyboard shortcut?

 

clipboard_image_1.jpeg

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.

It would be great if we could create more customization of the email output in the Events in the Workflow Configurations.  Currently we can output the number of error, warnings, etc. and the entire output log.  It would be great if we could only send the error messages in an email instead of sending the whole output log (similar to the output of a workflow run with errors in the Alteryx Gallery).  The customization in the Email Tool is great, but this isn't helpful when a scheduled workflow fails. I found this related thread on the discussion forum: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Customize-Events-Error-Message/td-p/42... Thanks!

0 Likes

I think it would be really useful to add bearing in degrees to the Find Nearest Tool. While the cardinal direction is helpful for context, it would be great to have finer detail than just the 8 options.

OK, this one will only save a single click per addition of a tool, but with Alteryx's general awesomeness small annoyances become like a stone in the shoe.

 

Consider my highly complex workflow below ; having inspected the dataset I now realise that I don't want some of the fields in my dataset...

 

SwitchToInput_1.PNG

 

...so I drag a Select tool in to deselect the columns, but I can't remember what the dataset looks like and I can't see the data...

 

 

SwitchToInput_2.PNG

 

...so I click on the Input tab and there it is, I can deselect away !

 

SwitchToInput_3.PNG

 

It would be particularly useful with something like a Summarize tool where I like to see the data to decide which aggregation to use.

 

Thanks !

When reading and writing large data frames to/from a python script in Alteryx it seems that there are limitations to the SQLite component of the tool. Given that this selection is recommended only when the user is having issues in the python tool why is the option selected by default? A colleague and I spent a couple of hours trying to work through an issue with importing a data frame larger than 1000x1000 and once we found this option (SQLite override) and unchecked it the data was written back to Alteryx without any problems.

 

Hint provided by the tool, "This changes the intermediate data format between Alteryx and Jupyter from yxdb to SQLite. Use only if running into issues. See help for more details."

 

SQLite override is default selectionSQLite override is default selection

Error message provided by the tool

error message.PNG

After unchecking the option the workflow ran without any errors.

 

Recommendation: the python tool should default to SQLite override unchecked

 

When I checked out if there is a way to force the intercept to 0 or some other constant value, it's not doable from the tool configurations.

Linear Regression.png

 

So manually we can have "0" intercept in linear regression this way (edit the macro's R tool)

 

cars.lm <- lm(dist ~ speed, data = cars)
cars.lm2 <- lm(dist ~ 0 + speed, data = cars) 
summary(cars.lm)

# Adding the 0 term tells the lm() to fit the line through the origin

 

So a minor addition of a tickbox will solve that and make that linear regression tool more flexible i guess...

 

Best...  

0 Likes

Would be interested if it was possible to turn off individual output tools individually rather than also disabling tools that write output, as it would be good to choose which output tools can write output, instead of placing them in a tool container for all of the output tools.

Be able to have a round function similar to Excel's Round Function. Basically, be able to round "5 and up" or "4 and down" based on the number of decimal spaces we choose. This would be similar to what is taught in grade school and would resolve 80% to 90% of the rounding issues in Alteryx. Most of rounding solutions provided are too technical and worthless. This is very basic and common sense. (FYI - I don't know if this helps, but I believe Excel only goes out to 13 decimal places before cutting it off, maybe if Alteryx could do the same with the rounding it would be helpful. 

 

Currently I'm pulling the exact same data through two different workflows, and getting two different amounts slightly off from each even though both use the same raw data source and datatype.  

By being able to connect to views in BQ we'd be able to skip the dependency on scheduling table refreshes within BQ and keep all of the dependencies in Alteryx.

0 Likes

Why don't Alteryx build an "Designer extended edition"?

 

An Alteryx designer download that contains every available 

  • R package and
  • Python package available in the universe to date of release...

all you can eat.png

Currently we can't use any PaaS MongoDB products (MongoDB Atlas / CosmosDB) as Alteryx Gallery doesn't support SSL for connecting to the MongoDB back end.

 

SSL is good security practice when splitting the MongoDB onto a different machine too.

I would like to see a Run Workflow Tool implemented which can run a specified workflow directly from the Designer. This tool would work similar to the Run Command Tool , but instead you can select the Analytical App Filename (.yxmc etc) and optional Analytical AppValues Filename (.yxwv) as parameters.

 

Currently you would need the Scheduler or Server licence to run a workflow via AlteryxEngineCmd.exe with the Run Command Tool, but there are legitimate uses which require a workflow to be dynamically determined within a larger workflow. I am aware of the CReW Runner Macros, but these require an additional Executable to be installed which is difficult for locked-down environments.

 

My example is a workflow which downloads a file list from a Web Service, there are a large number of interface items and 80% of the workflow is standardized. However the initial processing of the files is not, so either you create a workflow for each file type and map all the interface items again, include all the handled file types in one massive workflow, or, create sub workflows which transform the files which allows the minimum amount of repeating code.

 

When documentin alteryx screen I sometimes hit printscreen and need to paste important matters to Comment tool...

But there is no paste from clipboard 😞

 

idea.png

I suggest adding a minor icon that enables not only reading from png but pasting a screen or other image copied directly from memory...

 

For I need the following setting so I printscreen and capture as is;

 

Join doc.png

 

Then put that into a PNG or JPG file using paint. And then prepare a comment box with that image in the background...

 

Becomes.png

 

I believe that in addition to the already suggested idea of having an option to avoid sending one email per record, the attachments capability should be overhauled. Sending multiple attachments in a single email is a common need, but the only Community idea is a partial address of the issue by requesting an ability to use semi-colon separated paths in a single field as the attachment criterion. This doesn't seem to be an optimal method given the potential usefulness of the tool and ease of use considerations. 

 

I think that a full solution should include:

  • The capability to select a (file paths) field of all desired attachments which can then be uploaded into a single email
  • The ability to use wildcards or directories in the file input mode (as you find in the Input Tool) in order to upload multiple attachments to a single email)

This would be a transformative solution to a common email need, and I think greatly appreciated!

 

We are using Alteryx designer to bulk upload to Snowflake database. We also use Alteryx Connect to pick up metadata from Snowflake. It would be awesome if the designer can add table and field description and snowflake loader can pick up the description automatically. 

 

As of now, the metadata loader doesnt pick up metadata content in real time. This feature will motivate our analysts to document which will improve Connect adoption in our department. 

Top Liked Authors