Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Often as I am scraping web sites, some clever developer has put an invisible character (ASCII or Unicode) in the data which causes terrible trouble.

I've identified 89 instances of zero-width or non-zero-width glyphs that are not visible and/or Alteryx does not classify as whitespace. There are probably more, but Unicode is big y'all.

Unfortunately, the Trim() string function only removes 4 of these characters (Tab, Newline, Carriage Feed, and Space).
REGEX_REPLACE with the \s option (which is what the Cleanse macro uses) is a little better but still only removes 20. And it removes all instances, not just leading and trailing.

I've attached a workflow which proves this issue.

@apolly: this is what I mentioned at GKO.

And I did see this post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Elegantly-remove-all-ASCII-characters-...), but it's too brute force. Especially as Alteryx is localized and more users need those Unicode characters.

Hi Alteryx Team,

My work is to create Output from Alteryx and upload the Output file into Tibco Spotfire. So i want a system in which Alteryx output directly goes in to the Tibco Spotfire and update Tibco Spotfire in every 6 hours.
So do you have any plan to connect the Alteryx with Tibco Spotfire? This is will help me to automate the project.
If not pls think on these concept for future use.

XGboost regression is now the benchmark for every Kaggle competition and seems to consistently outperform random forest, spline regression, and all of the more basic models. For those of us using predictive modeling on a regular basis in our actual work, this tool would allow for a quick improvement in our model accuracy. And I think, from a marketing standpoint, having a core group of users competing in Kaggle using Alteryx would be a great way to show off Alteryx's power.

It is readily available as an R package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xgboost/index.html

Frequently with more complicated tool configurations I end up having to setup certain elements over and over again.  Would be great to have a one click "use this as the default" configuration that would follow my profile and apply to all future drags of that tool onto the workflow.  Configuration elements that depend on the input fields would not be impacted.

Also an apply all feature to apply the similar configuration elements to all tools of the same tool type.

Example Configuration Elements

Comment Tool - Shape, Font, text Color, Background Color, Alignment...

Tool Container - Text Color, fill color , border color, transparency, margin

Table Tool - Default Table Settings

Union Tool - "Auto config by name", Actions when fields differ

Data Clensing - all configuration elements

Sample - all configuration elements

Hi,

This is a small thing but it really messes with my OCD. It would be great if we could manually move the connection lines between tools , this would make large workflows a lot nicer to look at and easier to follow. 

I am aware of the wireless tool but i like to see connections, just want them a bit neater.

Thanks

When you use Create Points tool - you then almost always need to use a Select tool to rename that point.

Can we please add a single text field to the Create Points tool - which would then allow us to create and name a point in one step?

I'd like to hold CTRL, click on a tool and drag it to somewhere else on the canvas to copy it. 

This is functionality common in other software (e.g. Tableau, MS Office). 

Currently I have to either:

right click > Copy, right click > Paste, or

Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V. 

When writing an expression in a Formula tool, I love that you can just type an open bracket and suggestions pop up that allow you to auto-fill the rest of the variable name. What I find frustrating, however, is that once you type the open bracket, the highlighted field automatically moves to the one where your mouse is pointing, regardless of if you have moved your mouse or not. I think it makes more sense to always highlight the first field in the list and only take mouse position into account once it has actually moved.

It is hard to describe in just a picture as opposed to a video but essentially I had my mouse below where I was typing in the screenshot below then when I typed the open bracket, the 3rd field listed automatically got selected even though I never moved my mouse.

Cc: @Hollingsworth 

When saving an alteryx module (yxmd, yxmc, yxwz, yxzp), can we have a simple "SAVE AS" function that allows us to choose the version number?  Conversely, could we open a newer version module with a warning message rather than an error?

In either case there would be the logical CAVEAT that certain functions or features may not be compatible with the save/open function.

Thanks,

Mark

I think it would be nice to be able to more easily reorder fields that you're joining by in the Join tool.

For example, I have already joined by CASS_Address and CASS_City. After I did this, I realized I wanted to go back and join on Name, too, and I want that to be first. How the tool is configured now, if I want Name to be first, I must redo all of the drop downs. I would like to be able to add Name to the next set of open drop downs then use some arrow buttons to be able to move them up in the order (similar to the Summarize tool).

The default data type for new columns used to be Double, and now it is V_WString.  Is this user-configurable?  I find that, at least in my work, needing a formula to output a Double is way more common than a V_WString.  I'm curious of other community members' thoughts here.  If there isn't a consensus, it would be great to have this be a user-configurable default.

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

Cheers,

Mark

As a best practice, I'd like to automagically change any drive mapping to UNC when saving my workflows.  This applies to both local and gallery saves.

Cheers,

Mark

Configurable hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts would be awesome.  For instance, select/deselect highlighted fields or remove prefix are two commands that I use frequenctly but which are buried in menus.

Being able to assign hotkeys to favourite tools would be another time saver.  Imagine, ctrl-alt-F and a formula appears under the cursor!

There is a need when visualizing in-Database workflows to be able to visualize sorted data. This sorting could be done 1 of 2 ways: In a browse tool, or as a stand-alone Sort tool. Either would address the need. Without such a tool being present, the only way to sort the data is to "Data Stream Out" and then visualize the data in Alteryx. However, this process violates the premise of the usefulness of the in-DB toolkit, which is to keep your data in-DB and process using the DB engine. Streaming out big data in order to add a sort is not efficient.

Granted, the in-DB processing doesn't care whether data is sorted or not. However, when attempting to find extreme values after an aggregation, or when trying to identify something as simple as whether null values are present in a field, then a sort becomes extremely useful, and a necessary tool for human consumption of data (regardless of the database's processing needs).

Thanks very much for hearing my idea!

Could we please have a Type field added to the "Select Fields to Cleanse" configuration window for the Data Cleansing Tool? This small feature would save a lot of time (saving the time needed to check the Metadata for every field every time I use the Data Cleansing Tool). Similar functionality to the way the Summarize Tool displays both Field and Type (just one additional field).

Today:

Future Version:

Pardon my sad photoshopping 🙂

Note: I realize the Data Cleansing is a macro and this functionality is not currently available with the "Check Box" interface tool.

Thank you!

Currently when you add an event to notify you of workflow failure / success - you have to enter the SMTP settings every time.    It would be more efficient to set this up as a user setting which can be used for the default across all canvasses that this user creates.

Every time we create a file output - you first have to check if the folder exists - and if not then create it.

Currently it's quite onerous to do a directory create - especially with all the error trapping to make this production safe - and everyone is reinventing the wheel in their own companies.

Given the commonality of this need - could we add a tool that allows you to check for existance of a directory and attempt to create it (with nested directories and useful status / error descriptions to act upon)

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.