Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

 

 

Hi there,

 

Adam ( @AdamR_AYX ), Mark ( @MarqueeCrew) and many others have done a great job in putting together super helpful add-in macros in the CREW pack - and James ( @jdunkerley79 ) has really done an incredible job of filling in some gaps in a very useful way in the formula tools.

 

Would be possible to include a subset of these in the core product as part of the next release?

I'm thinking of (but others will chime in here to vote for their favourite):

- Unique only tool (CReW)

- Field Sort (CReW)

- Wildcard XLSX input (CReW) - this would eliminate a whole category of user queries on the discussion boards

- Runner (CReW - although this may have issues with licensing since many people don't have command line permission - Alteryx does really need the ability to do chained dependancy flows in a more smooth way.

- Date Utils (JDunkerly) - all of James's Date utils - again, these would immediately solve many of the support questions asked on the discussion forum

 

I think that these would really add richness & functionality to the core product, and at the same time get ahead of many of the more common queries raised by users.   I guess the only question is whether the authors would have any objection?

 

Thank you

Sean

The v10 formula configuration window had two very small advantages.  First, it always had an extra 'line' for another output field (no pressing '+' required).  Second, it defaulted to letting you immediately begin typing the name of the next column (no need to press 'Select Column' then 'Add New Column').   I know these are minor, but every little thing counts when you're doing heavy development.

 

It has been brought up that the following comments were given during the beta.  While I appreciate the reasoning of requiring 'obvious intention,' my personal opinion is that it is overkill in this scenario.  Even for new users, the old design was quite intuitive.

 

 

"Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback! This touches a conversation topic that has been ongoing here at Alteryx. While we want workflow development to be as fast as possible, we also are  trying to address the overall usability of the tool and make sure it is very clear what we intend the user to do. We decided to have the UI ask for an explicit action (pick an existing field to edit or click to add a new field) to help make those options clear, as we have found that users don't always understand from the existing tool that this is the first decision they should make when using the tool. That being said, your feedback is definitely valuable. I will be sure to bring this up as we are making improvements to the new tool and see if there's a compromise that we can make on speed vs. obvious intention. Thanks for taking the time!"

I have reviewed a number of batch macros that work well for mirroring the "NetworkingDays" excel calculation but it would be great to add an interval type for "weekdays" to the DateTimeDiff formula ie

 

 DateTimeDiff ( [Date01],[Date02], "WorkDays")  where any Saturday or Sunday between the dates would be discounted.

Would be extremely useful if the Summarize Tool had an option in the numeric menu to Standardize the data.  More often than not, data sets will not have the same count of variables which makes the comparison analysis meaningless.  Currently, there is no easy way to Standardize the data without using the K-Centroids Cluster Analysis tool or standardize_unit interval supporting macro. 

We often build very large Alteryx projects that breakdown large data processing jobs into multiple self contained workflows.

 

We use CReW Runner tools to automate running the workflows in sequence but it would be nice if Alteryx supported this natively with a new panel for "Projects"

 

Nice features for Projects could be:

• Set the sequence
• Conditional sequence
• Error handling
• Shared constants
• Shared aliases
• Shared dependencies
• Chained Apps
• Option to pass data between workflows - Input from yxmd Output - no need to persist intermediary data
• Input/output folder/project folder setups for local data sources in dependencies window
• Ability to package like "Export Workflow" for sharing
• Results log the entire project

When you use a Find Replace tool, it would be GREAT if you had a select all option for what you want to append to the find data set.

 

It would be extra GREAT if you added the ability to draw a box over the ones you want to add, or have a feature where you could select the first on on the list and hold the shift+ctr to select multiple lines at once.

 

🙂

Idea:

An Alteryx version for Mac OS X sounded like a nice idea... Although there are options for using bootcamp with windows 7-8

or some virtualisation software as mentioned in a community post here.

 

Rationale 1 (Competitors do it):

First of all there is no need to neglect a customer segment using Mac's.

 

• Rapidminer Studio comes with a dedicated OS X version,
• Knime has Mac OS X support 
• Weka has Mac OS X support as well
• SPSS Modeler is Windows only but SPSS Stats is Mac OS X compatible.

 

Seems SAS was compatable in the last decade, but they dropped it. Now SAS is not OS X compatible but

still with the "SAS OnDemand" version Mac users can easly get a hands on experience.

 

Rationale 2:

The Mac Pro Beast has 7.2 TFlops of computing power with the help of dual ATI graphics cards.

It would be awesome to install Alteryx on one... 

 

It would be very helpful if Alteryx allowed us to manually configure the IP and port number of a web proxy in instances when we are accessing online services. 

In recent months a new global app was added to allow the monitor of activity on an application. This is a great start but more details would make tracking a lot easier for our company.  We update the apps on a monthly basis due to the continual change of data, this will only allow us to track activity for the prior month only.  1 month's activity is not a beneficial gage for usage for us. 

What I would like to see is the ability to look at activity based off of a designated time frame of activity.  Since one of our apps can generate up to 5 different reports depending on what is selected, it would be a benefit to us to be able to track which report the user is running vs just running the overall app itself. 
 

In the Gallery, when reviewing the results of a recently run app, the option to save the results to Dropbox is currently an option.  This is a great, however, the only file format that is allowed to be saved there is .pcxml.

Please add the option to save any of the other report formats to Dropbox (.xlsx, .pdf, .pptx, .html, etc.).

When workig on a module with many tools, and one of those tools is the Allocate Input tool (Experian US), whenever you try to access or configure that other tools, there is a delayed reponse.  I'm assuming because the Allocate data set is so large.  But, it would be nice, if possible, that when accessing/configuring other tools you did not get that delay.  My workaround is to Container the Allocate tool and disable it.  

It would be very useful to be able to add trendlines (linear, power etc) to charts (particularly scatter graphs) as in Excel.

Whilst not quite as efficient, the ability to overlay a line graph onto a scatter would enable the user to achieve a similar result as the points for the line can be calculated.

Create a new module that outputs statistics after processing. For instance creating a table of all used modules by reference number with fields for records input, records output, processing time, processor load, memory used.  As well as starttime, endtime, username, hostname, etc.  This would make debugging quite a bit easier, expecially if the results could be output to Excel.