Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Most organizations have rules for password expiry every 60-90 days. We have to go into each workflow that has an email tool and update it manually and reschedule it.
If the username and password for an email tool is coming from a field, we can then use a macro to update it.

Would be great to see a 'built-in' select on the input tool.

Appreciate you can do this when connecting to dbs but nearly every time I (and I believe most others) use the input tool to connect to a file, the next tool I use is a select tool to rename/remove/change type of the incoming data.

If there was a select tool 'built-in' to the input tool (as the mocked-up image below shows) it would offer three key benefits:

1) quicker for the user

2) cleaner workflow view (especially in workflows with multiple input tools, each subsequently followed by select tools)

3) more intuitive for new users - after all, they are the future of the Alteryx community 🙂

File Input Select

The COMMENT tool has a number of default settings.  It would save me a lot of time if the Designer could remember the last settings used.  

This is the panel I am referring to:

I wanted to understand the purpose of the Select Records Tool. The text explains the tool, but by adding the Record ID Tool the result is obvious and also connects to the record selection, not having to read the explanation first. At the same time, one gets to know the Record ID Tool.

Without the Record ID Tool

With the Record ID Tool

Many times we create and work on multiple workflows that are similar or are tied to the same project, but when it comes time to save them we must save each workflow as an individual file.I think it would be great if we can mimic what MS Office/Tableau have done; allow user to save multiple tabs or reports/dashboards under the same file. It would be great if Alteryx will allow us to create multiple workflows under the same workbook which can be renamed, be tied to their own workflow schedules without having to be saved separately and can be tied under the same 'project' or 'workbook'. 

In alterxy BI teams, we often need to hit the same data-store - however if shared connections are not adopted in the server environment, there's currently no easy way to share the connections among the team (none that I know of)

Would be great if there were a "share" button on the data connections tab in the designer, so that we could share connections with a team, or export known good connections to a file that can be kept under config-management / version control.

Thank you

Sean

Hello,

In Formula tool beneficial will be implementation conditional formatting (similar like in Excel) allowing to change cell style (i.e. background color or bolding) based on specific rule. Currently such functionality is available in Table tool however it might be more convenient to use it in Formula tool and avoid Table tool.

It would be really usefull when we can filter fields by name and make selection. At times I have work with 300+ fields and it's really hard to scroll down to select few fields. Tableau has this feature. Wer can have this feature in select and all embedded select tools (join, append etc)

The XML Parse tool has a checkbox to ignore errors and continue.  This idea works for all options that allow you to ignore errors.  It would be great if XML Parse had 2 outputs, 1 for successful records and another for the errored records.  This would make it much easier to identify and update (if necessary) errored records.

In my view this would make it more similar to other tools like Filter or Spatial Match where records that don't fit your criteria follow a different flow.

Thanks for considering

Hi

We have recently upgraded to 18.3 and noticed that the Filter tool expression box has lost its colour coding of expression elements. The Formula tool (which still has the 18.2 look and feel) however still has the old colour coding.

It would be great if the colour coding could be included for all tools with expression editing boxes.

Examples attached for clarity.

Thanks

My users need the same functionnality In-db as the in-memory tool "Field Summary".

The purpose is to discover the data : distribution, minimum, maximum, count,valid, unique, ...

Many legacy applications that use Mainframes have certain data encoded in EBCDIC  in DB2 tables(variable length columns  that can have 0-100s of iterations in a single EBCDIC encoded compressed data). When this data is downloaded to a platform like Hadoop that does'nt understand EBCDIC data , It appears as junk characters . 

I solved this issue in my project  using an approach designed/implemented in PySpark script[ separate logic needed for COMP , COMP3, X(alphanumeric)  datatypes] .Having this functionality in a Tool can help many Organizations that  use data from Mainframes applications.

Thanks to members of this forum I have now got my head around how the Run Command tool works and find it incredibly useful. The documentation around the tool is minimal (only this community really...) plus the naming of the items isn't always obvious what values they expect to have entered.

This is one of the most powerful tools in the Alteryx toolset, with Run Command it's possible to do more or less anything you want using Alteryx, it's just unfortunate it's highly opaque how to use it with the existing documentation.

For example it's far from clear what input should come into the tool. I now know you can write a command line script in a formula tool and only bring that script into the tool, which will then create that script and save it based on the name given in the Output section. There is no way to know this using the documentation within Alteryx. Then you can run this script you have somehow created in the Command section just by entering the file path of this currently non-existent bat file.

How you're meant to know the button Input will then output the results of the script, assuming the script was written to output the results, is still a mystery.

Naming the components of the tool more appropriately would be a good start, although I admit not simple to do. Introducing a detailed help section with a few examples would be very useful and unleash far more Alteryx power to more users.

I think the Nearest Neighbor Algorithm is one of the least used, and most powerful algorithms I know of.  It allows me to connect data points with other data points that are similar.  When something is unpredictable, or I simply don't have enough data, this allows me to compare one data point with its nearest neighbors.

So, last night I was at school, taking a graduate level Econ course.  We were discussing various distance algorithms for a nearest neighbor algorithm.  Our prof discussed one called the Mahalanobis distance.  It uses some fancy matrix algebra.  Essentially it allows it it to filter out the noise, and only match on distance algorithms that are truly significant.  It takes into account the correlation that may exists within variables, and reduces those variables down to only one.  

I use Nearest Neighbor when other things aren't working for me.  When my data sets are weak, sparse, or otherwise not predictable.  Sometimes I don't know that particular variables are correlated.  This is a powerful algorithm that could be added into the Nearest Neighbor, to allow for matches that might not otherwise be found.  And allow matches on only the variables that really matter.  

Hi,

when I right-click on an Input tool, I can select "Convert To Macro Input" from the context menu. I would like the similar functionality when right-clicking a Browse tool to "Convert To Macro Output".

There is currently no way to export interactive output from the network graph tool. I would like to be able to export a png of the static network graph image, a pdf of the report, and a complete html of the whole (which means including the JSON and vis.js files necessary for creating the report).

My employer just started with Alteryx, so I'm sure after a few months, this will be basic simple, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who has made this mistake, so there you go...

I was running a larger workflow that ends with outputting a table with about 80 columns.  Everything was working fine, except for one column, which kept coming up as all 0s.  Took me a while to find it, but the error all traced back to an error I made with a "Contains" function in a Formula node.

The Alteryx "Contains" function takes two arguments, 'string' and 'target'.  I interpreted this as 'find this string in this target variable', and entered two arguments: the string of characters I was looking for first, and then the name of the column I wanted to search in second. 

I think I had this backwards.  You need to enter the column name first, then the substring you want to look for second.  So the column name is the 'string' and the search term is the 'target'.  Me getting these reversed did not produce any errors or warnings, which I understand (e.g. maybe you might want to pairwise search for the text in one column in the text of another).

I think the terms 'string' and 'target' are kind of vague labels in this case (in Excel, for example, the analogous "Search" function takes the arguments 'find_text' and 'within_text', which is a lot harder to misinterpret).  So I would suggest changing the argument names in Designer and the online documentation, or at least adding text to the Alteryx Documentation (https://help.alteryx.com/2019.2/Reference/Functions.htm) that clarifies which is which.

Normally, I'd say this is a pretty minor thing, but since this is a potential 'silent error', I'd argue it's worthwhile.

(Also, the online documentation seems to imply there is a "CaseInsensitive" argument you can pass to "Contains", however I don't think there actually is.  May want to edit that for clarity.)

Thanks!

Even with browse everywhere I see plenty of workflows dotted with browses.  Old habits die hard.  Maybe a limit configuration for browses would be a good thing.  If you've recently browsed a very large set of data you might agree.

Cheers,

Mark