Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The Legacy Excel output Driver has the ability to Delete Data & Append as an output option for Excel files.  This is useful to retain custom formatting and conditional formatting on a worksheet.

However, the new Excel Output Driver and Macro-Enabled Excel Driver do not have this option.

I think this would be very helpful for a lot of our business needs, as we still use Excel for a lot of our reporting needs.  I know that Tableau is a very powerful tool for exactly this sort of situation, but we do not yet have any widespread adoption at our company.

Particularly, conditional formatting would be a fantastic option, as it would save a lot of post-run manual process.

It would be super cool to run a regular workflow in "test mode" or some other such way of running it just one tool at a time, so you can check tool outputs along the way and fix issues as they occur, especially for big workflows. Another advantage would be that if, for whatever reason, a working module stops working (maybe someone changed an underlying file - that NEVER happens to me lol), rather than running the whole thing, fixing something, running the whole thing again, you could just fix what's broken and run it that far before continuing.

Actually, that gives me an even better idea... a stop/start tool. Drop it in the workflow and the module will run up to that point and stop or start from that point. Hmm... time to submit a second idea!

In addition to the existing functionality, it would be good if the below functionality can also be provided.

1) Pattern Analysis

This will help profile the data in a better way, help confirm data to a standard/particular pattern, help identify outliers and take necessary corrective action.

Sample would be - for emails translating 'abc@gmail.com' to 'nnn@nnnn.nnn', so the outliers might be something were '@' or '.' are not present.
Other example might be phone numbers, 12345-678910 getting translated to 99999-999999, 123-456-78910 getting translated to 999-999-99999, (123)-(456):78910 getting translated to (999)-(999):99999 etc.

It would also help to have the Pattern Frequency Distribution alongside.

So from the above example we can see that there are 3 different patterns in which phone numbers exist and hence it might call for relevant standadization rules.

2) More granular control of profiling

It would be good, that, in the tool, if the profiling options (like Unique, Histogram, Percentile25 etc) can be selected differently across fields.

A sub-idea here might also be to check data against external third party data providers for e.g. USPS Zip validation etc, but it would be meaningful only for selected address fields, hence if there is a granular control to select type of profiling across individual fields it will make sense.

Note - When implementing the granular control, would also need to figure out how to put the final report in a more user friendly format as it might not conform to a standard table like definition.

3) Uniqueness

With on-going importance of identifying duplicates for the purpose of analytic results to be valid, some more uniqueness profiling can be added.

For example - Soundex, which is based on how similar/different two things sound.
Distance, which is based on how much traversal is needed to change one value to another, etc.

So along side of having Unique counts, we can also have counts if the uniqueness was to factor in Soundex, Distance and other related algorithms.

For example if the First Name field is having the following data -

Jerry
Jery
Nick
Greg
Gregg

The number of Unique records would be 5, where as the number of soundex unique might be only 3 and would open more data exploration opportunities to see if indeed - Jerry/Jery, Greg/Gregg are really the same person/customer etc.

4) Custom Rule Conformance

I think it would also be good if some functionality similar to multi-row formula can be provided, where we can check conformance to some custom business rules.

For e.g. it might be more helpful to check how many Age Units (Days/Months/Year) are blank/null where in related Age Number(1,10,50) etc are populated, rather than having vanila count of null and not null for individual (but related) columns.

Thanks,

Rohit

It may be user-friendly to display the DSN description. It's usually stored in the windows registry under "description" :

This should display in the log and when you configure a connexion.

Following unexpected behaviour from the Render tool where outputting to a UNC Path (see post) in a Gallery Appliction, on advice of support raising this idea to introduce consistent behavior across all tools where utilising a UNC Path.

It would be nice if we could use our gallery with a mobile app. We like to run demographics on site and have to pull up on the ipad.

Also, if instead of typing in an address, we could use the iphones "current location" option. 

Would save an extra select for parsing text files in correct format for dates and times.

Alternative data sources are key for enriching data. one source is social media.I believe Alteryx lacks in social media analytics.

• I would like to propose a YouTube connector...
  
• Crawl comments and video definitions (useful for text analytics)
  
• Impression and likes/dislikes... (time-series data)
  

If you are into #media, #advertising, #marketing analytics, #influencer analytics please support the idea by seconding...

There is an API called YouTube DATA API

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started

When output is disabled, Alteryx's output tools are helpfully grayed out and include the message 'output has been disabled by the workflow properties.'

However, if a macro has an output, there is no visual indicator that output is disabled, even though the macro's output will also be suppressed by this workflow configuration.

Obviously, macros can be very complex, and could have both a file and a macro output, or have an optional file output, so these cannot be entirely locked out just because there is an output.

To that end, I suggest some other kind of color-coding/shading be applied visually to these tools, and that a message be added to the interface for these macros that says something like "output has been disabled, this macro may not perform all of its functions".

I just spent about 10 minutes debugging why a macro wasn't working properly in one workflow but was working in another, and it was because I had disabled output, which I wasn't thinking of because this particular macro uses the Render tool to produce a hyperlink.  I wouldn't have spent more than 30 seconds on this if there was some kind of visual indicator showing me what I was doing wrong!

When using Alteryx from an enterprise, the understanding of all of the known Alteryx domains should be documented.

https://www.alteryx.com/

https://community.alteryx.com/

https://help.alteryx.com/11.5/index.htm

http://downloads.alteryx.com/

https://gallery.alteryx.com

Are there more domains that should be put onto the white list or is that the total set of websites necessary to use Alteryx without firewall issues? 

When downloading files from Alteryx, we also want to list the types of files that we should allow users access.  For documentation, I expect that we will see PDF files.  For installs, either ZIP or EXE files?  

When it comes to setting rules, the more information the better.  Otherwise, users may be blocked and not able to use functions.

Thanks,

Mark

Hi all,

We were working through some ideas with @BenG and @KatieH about how we can streamline the process of understanding data at the point of bringing this into Alteryx.

We currently have a visual way to see columns that have leading whitespace or null (with the visualitics that have been added to the browse tools) - we can take this further:

• After any input tool, alteryx looks at the data to see what can be done to help cleanse:
  • for columns that look like they have dates - check cleanliness and offer to add the required tools to get these into a clean date format
  • for columns that look like ZIP codes - offer to check vs. US ZIP codes and cleanup
• For columns that have leading or trailing whitespace - offer to add a tool to the canvas to clean this up
• For number columns that have nulls - offer to add a default
• For columns that have strings that contain dates - quick wizard for any anomalies and then add in the tools to automate this cleanup next time.
• For columns which are XML - offer to check this for XML errors
• For any CSV files - check for rows that have different number of columns - and intelligently sideline these

Putting this wizard immediately after input tools, which would then automatically add tools to the canvas to automate the cleanup that we'd agreed during the wizard - we can dramatically reduce / eliminate the cost of the standard data prep tasks.

NOTE: This is exactly how Watson Analytics works when you bring in data, and it makes the process much quicker.

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

When running Alteryx using parallels we were unable to start a CSV file on a specific line (greater than 1).

Message:  Attempted to skip more lines than in file.  Please check the import line.

The filename includes a UNC path.  We attempted to modify the workflow dependency to be relative (all options were tried).  Alteryx could not/did not change the path as when using parallels the directory is always UNC.

This problem was posted in the discussions and I'm entering it here in ideas for remediation.

Cheers,

Mark

It would be nice to improve upon the 'Block Until Done' tool.

Additional Features I could see for this tool:

1: Allow Any tool (even output) to be linked as an incoming connection to a 'Block Until Done' tool.  

2: Allow Multiple Tools to be linked to a 'Block Until Done' tool. (similar to the 'Union' tool)

The functionality I see for this is to enable Alteryx set the Order of Operation for workflows and Allowing people to automate processes in the same way that people used to do them. I understand there's a work around using Crew Macros (Runner/Conditional Runner) that can essentially accomplish this;  howerver (and I may be wrong).  But it feels like a work around, instead of the tool working the way one would expect; and I'm loosing the ability to track/log/troubleshoot my workflow as it progresses (or if it has an issue)

Happy to hear if something like that exists.  Just looking for ways to ensure order of operation is followed for a particular workflow I am managing. 

Thanks,

Randy

Idea:

Let's add the universal PMML predictive markup language to rapidly deploy our predictive models. 

Rationale:

Most of the predictive models created are essentially built to be deployed into well known enterprise level decisioning tools.

These decisioning tools are working at banks, non bank financial institutions, credit card issuers, insurers on a daily basis.

If Alteryx want's to replace SAS, SPSS and similar competitor this PMML addition seems to be a must.

They all have a common markup language and even with the newer version we can deploy almost all data pre-processing steps too...

Current status in Alteryx as I'm aware of:

Only case where Alteryx and PMML comes close is the following link; http://www.alteryx.com/topic/pmml promising including PMML in the upcoming releases in 2012. And then no word of it. The writer is retired already and no word since 2012 (3 yrs is a long time span). 

What to do:

On easy way is already done for R, this is a Java library for converting R models to PMML https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-converter

Clients:

FICO is one of the well known credit bureaus worldwide and also the vendor of decisioning software. They also have an Analytics Modeler Suite. All FICO systems are PMML compliant. Chek it out: http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/2014/10/17/first-look-fico-analytic-modeler-suite-jtonedm...

Also Experian is one of the other big software vendors in the Analytics space with decision management tools and they are actually a partner of Alteryx too... Their well known widely implemented Powercurve tool has PMML language import too... Check it out: http://jtonedm.com/2014/05/13/first-look-experian-powercurve-update/

IBM ODM is a nother vendor for decisioning tools in the enterprise level. They also have PMML integration, look; http://www.prolifics.com/blog/odm-integration-spss-predictive-analysis-suite-part-1-pmml-import

Competitor status:

SAS supports PMML export from SAS Enterprise Miner

IBM SPSS products (Modeler and Statistics) offer a great deal of support for PMML

KNIME is one of the leaders in processing PMML documents 

RapidMiner has a PMML extension

MicroStrategy strongly supports the standard

Modify the taskbar icon while according to workflow status to provide a visual queue when workflows are running/completed, like the SAS running man or the Teradata sunglasses... The Alteryx A could be going places.

I was with my friends at Limited Brands yesterday and they pointed out to me a way to improve Alteryx.  While designing a workflow, each time you add an input tool to the canvas you literally have to start from scratch to add additional tables from either a db datasource or file source (e.g. access).  With other tools, you can drag multiple tables to the canvas at once and come back later and add more inputs without having to select your source, see a list of tables etcetera.

On their behalf (they may post another suggestion), I am posting this idea.

Thanks,

Mark

The idea is specific for streaming analytics;

Alteryx seems it can be scheduled frequently to see if there is an update to a file in question.

It would be awesome to enable a listener which will be auto triggered when;

• ay new line is added to a data set (probably a log file) or
• an update to an existing row in a database (then the relevant score will be recalculated for ex.)

It will be straight forward to provide reactive responses to a log file and voila!

Alteryx automation and alteryx server will become a "complex event processor"...

complex event processing with Alteryx?

Here is a link to wiki page for CEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_event_processing

@GeorgeM would you think this will put Alteryx to another gartner MQ* as well?

*https://www.gartner.com/doc/3165532/add-event-stream-processing-business

It would be great if you could link a comment box to an object.  This would be great because if the objects moves for what ever reason the comment would stay with it.