Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello,

In Datascience, Levenshtein and Jaro Winkler distances are used to quanitify a similarity between two strings.

Here the wikipedia pages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance

Note 1 : the Levenshtein and Jaro Distances are already used in Fuzzy Matching tool, so that shouldn't be a huge work to include it in formula
Note 2 : there is a useful macro on the galley https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/LevenshteinDistance/5c54701f826fd30988f02779
Note 3 : some product already have it implemented such as Apache Hive or Qlik Sense

Best regards,

Simon

Now that the formula tool has syntaxing and highlighting and autofilling, it would be great if it would color things differently depending on the datatype. Currently fields are blue and constants are green when I go to select them:

I think the constants can remain green, but then maybe have something like: strings = blue, numbers=red, dates=orange, blobs/spatials/bool/anything else=black (or any other colors that look good). Then the formula tool would also have similar colors. Currently my fields and constants both look purplish:

Instead, I think the colors should remain the same (ie. ALAE Reserve should be blue and the engine should be green) 

It would be great to have an option in the Output Data tool to write the workflow name to the Info properties of Excel outputs.

Maybe something like this:

So that whenever you open an Excel file you always have a way of finding the name of the workflow that created the file.

This would make it so much easier as I often have to share Excel files with colleagues and customers and then need a way of tracking them back to workflows weeks or months later.

This is similar to a prior idea now marked complete "Allow macro metadata to persist until next run".  I tried the check box solution and still have the same issue, running V11.

What we NEED is for tools that derive columns like CrossTab to retain metadata from the most recent run and thus pass that metadata downstream for further tools and development.

Use case:

I have several cross tabs and before V11 I could run the flow once to push metadata downstream, then add or modify tools downstream and the derived fields from the cross tab stayed available in those tools to be recognized and referenced as I add more tools and logic. Now in V11 I am finding if I click on a tool or add a tool downstream the metadata for the derived columns disappears.

I attached pics to illustrate where I have 6 CrossTabs and decided I needed to add a summary downstream.  I had to run the flow to get metadata populated which is normal and I added the first summary, then inserted another summary and immediately the derived column metadata was lost in all paths after the crosstabs.  so ended up having to re-run the flow 5 more times for each summary tool added. then I had to re-run it 5 more times to adjust column names in selects after downstream joins.

I end up wasting a lot of time having to re-run a sufficient test file to feed all the variety of data necessary to generate all columns between most edits or new tool adds.  What used to take ~5 minutes to do now takes ~35

I recall seeing and discussing this issue previously and hoped the check box would resolve but It does not fix the issue.  

We see similar issue for tools downstream from other tools where the columns are derived or uncertain until that tool runs, such as, transpose, Joins and Unions.  I recall some discussion at user groups and in the community but the only reference I found this morning of seeming relevance is the one I mentioned above.

DearAlteryx team and community,

all the best for 2021!

Thank you very much for enhancing the output option from Alteryx Designer to Excel keeping the format.

For a lot of my use cases this is very helpful!

Still, there are some use cases left. In case I want to overwrite a calculated/linked number (e.g. calculated prediction) with the Actual number, it would be very helpful to feed into those cells as well. At the moment Alteryx is doing the job but I receive a lot of Excel Errors (xml errors) and a corupt Excel file when overwriting calculated fields/linked fields.

Is there a chance to extend the current setup for all of those cases?

Thanks and best regards

Chhristoph

I have had multiple instances of needing to parse a set of PDF files. While I realize that this has been discussed previously with workarounds here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Can-Alteryx-Parse-A-Word-Doc-Or-PDF/ta-p/115...

having a native PDF input tool would help me significantly. I don't have admin rights to my computer (at work) so downloading a new app to then use the "Run Command" tool is inconvenient, requires approval from IT, etc. So, it would save me (and I'm sure others) time both from an Alteryx workflow standpoint each time I need it, but also from an initial use to get the PDFtoText program installed.

When we edit formula tool, only first expression is expanded. I prefer all expressions are expanded as a default. When I want to shrink them, I want to 'expand all' icon like attached snap shot. This icon is toggled same as each expression's expand icon('expand all' <-> 'shrink all')

The Alteryx.Flexnetoperations.com  license management site needs major work.

On the View Licenses page it shows all licenses going back several years. A basic need is to show only licenses which haven't expired, but that is not an option.You cannot even sort on the expiration column while you can sort on most others columns.

The most simple need is to see a list of my current active license users - but I do't see a way to do that.

I tried an "Advanced Search" and chose  expiration date after 2019-10-29 and none of my licenses which expire in 2020 appear - I get a blank list.

Similarly on the administer machines page you cannot filter to hide expired licenses or even on the licenses column (which doesn't sort either).

The help link on the page doesn't bring you to help specific to that page but the general activation help front page. After several clicks I found this page:

https://help.alteryx.com/licensing/current/Administer/AdministerMachines.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C__...

But  the help is incomplete (doesn't list Machine types or the difference between Active and Inactive)

Also, there is no export capability - copy and pasting into Excel is a formatting headache as it brings in check-boxes.

Lots of room for improvement here.

Cheers,

Bob

P.S. I understand that work is being done on this, but an ETA would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

Carlson Companies is moving to a Vertica environment and it would be great if that was supported with the In-database tools. That would definitely help and expand the use of Alteryx at our company!

Thanks,

Tyler Mittelstadt

I would like to suggest 2 small changes to make working with Interface tools easier:

1) Let a user change the name of Question Constants from the workflow tab. For example, I would love the ability to change the names of my list boxes below. Currently, I can click in the name box and write new names in, but it doesn't stick.

2) Let the user add the value on the Interface tools under the Annotation tab. Currently, I drop an interface tool on, change the name on the annotation tab, and then have to go the the workflow tab to setup a value. It would be easier if the value box was also on the annotation tab:

With the 2019.3 release the summarize tool now includes prefixes for grouped fields. While a nice addition, in application it makes using this data downstream (like joining to other tables) more involved because of needing to remove this prefix. 

It would be nice to have this as an option (a checkbox to add/remove prefixes maybe) or just revert back to pre-2019.3 behavior...thanks!

Tableau v2018.3 introduced multiple table extracts. These are particularly useful for fact table to fact table joins and fact table to entitlement table joins for row-level security where the number of rows created by the join and/or size of join results would be prohibitively large. Also they are useful for fact table to spatial joins where we might have multiple spatial objects (for example custom province/district/health facility catchment) for each row of fact table data.

So in Alteryx I'd like to be able to specify 2+ tables & their join keys and then write out a .hyper multiple tables extract.

Jonathan

With the continued growth of Graph Databases, it would be nice for Alteryx to creates a new tool set that would allow input/output connectors for Graph Databases like Neo4j which software tools like Pentaho and Talend already have.

Keith. 

Please update the Publish to Tableau Server connector tool to support Tableau's Ask Data feature. The data source must be recognized as an extract on Tableau Server in order for the Ask Data feature to work. Currently, all data source published using version 2.0 of the connector tool are recognized as a live data source. The work around is cumbersome and requires multiple copies of data sources to be created and managed.

I use a mouse which has a horizontal scroll wheel. This allows me to quickly traverse the columns of excel documents, webpages, etc.

This interaction is not available in Alteryx Designer and when working with wide data previews it would improve my UX drastically. 

I like the new cache option in 2018.3, but I would like a user setting added that would allow me to 1) write the cache files to a local drive and 2) have them persist when I re-open Alteryx. Currently, the files are written to the user defaulted temp space and don't persist when Alteryx is closed down. Thanks!

Pushing data to Salesforce from Oracle would bemuch easier if we were able to perform an UPSERT (Update if existing, Insert if not existing) function on any unique ID field in Salesforce. Instead of us having to do a filter to find the records that have or don't have an ID and run an Update or Insert based on the filter.

Hi,
Just learnt today that Download Tool doesn't support uploading to a SFTP server. This feature is pretty critical and essential for many use in the Enterprise world. Is this something we can expect in next release?
-Hemanth

Similar to the Select tool's Unknown Field Checkbox, I figured it would be useful for the Data Cleansing tool to have this functionality as well in order to avoid a scenario where after a cross-tab you have a new numeric field, one of which has a Null value, so you can't total up multiple fields because the Null value will prevent the addition from happening. If the Unknown Field box were checked off in the Data Cleansing tool then this problem would be avoided.