Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Idea: Prompt the user to find a missing macro instead of the current UX of a question mark icon.

Issue: When a macro referenced in a workflow is missing, then there is no way to a) know what the name of the macro was (assuming you were lazy like me and didn't document with a comment) and b) find the macro so you can get back to business.

When this happens to me know, I have to go to the XML view and search for macros and then cycle through them until I find the one that's missing. Then I have to either copy the macro back into that location or manually edit the workflow XML. Not cool man.

Solution: When a macro is missing, the image below at the right should be shown. In the properties window, a file browse tool should allow the user to find the macro.

When I put a map snippet into a report, there is no border. Therefore, road segments just terminate into whitespace.

Please add an option to create a border around the map snippet.Map With No Border

Map With A Border

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:

We are attempting to connect to a Sybase DB. The version we're trying to connect to is 15.7.0. It seems Alteryx only officially supports 15.0.2 connection. 

Will there be an update coming in a future release so that we can connect directly and not have to use DB extracts? 

How about a quick method of disabling a container.

Current state - Click on the container, pan the mouse all the way over to the tiny checkbox target in the configuration pane and click disable.

Future state - little icon by the rollup icon that can be clicked to disable/enable, differentiated by perhaps a color change of the minimized pane perhaps?

I know what you're thinking, "talk about lazy, he's whining about moving the mouse (which his hand was already on) 2 cm along his desktop and clicking"... but still what an easy usability win and one less click to do a task I find myself repeating frequently.

Would love to see the Workflow - Configuration > Runtime > Record Limit for All Inputs option extended to Dynamic Input tools.

Good afternoon,

If any one of you have had to create Column Rules in the Table Tool for multiple Table Tools you'll know how much of a pain it is to set the same rules over and over and over.

It would be an amazing addition if we had the functionality to copy column rules to apply to other Table Tools.

What are yalls thoughts?

-Nick

Example1

Hi,

I was just working on an application that targets a back end database, which is currently manually refreshed.  A user on my side requested that we include a "Data Last Refreshed on" text on the application, so that users would see it whenever they ran the app.

I was able to accomplish this by using a Drop Down tool populated using the "External Source" List Values, which is not connected to any Action tool.  However, this is a somewhat ugly solution to the problem - it creates one more clickable object for the user that doesn't actually do anything.

I think having a "Label" tool, which functioned similar to a Text Box (multiline support) but did not allow users to enter values, that included the "External Source" option from the List Box/Drop Down, would be a huge help for Application Development.  This would let you create a configurable message for your users, be it a Last Refresh, runtime instructions, or even a Last Run Date for the application.

When we open any workflow, its becomes very difficult to understand from which gallery I have opened the workflow(s). Could you please do something, so that once the mouse pointer gets move into the workflow tab in designer, it will display the corresponding path as well.

In Excel we have the option of adding icons based on conditional formatting (example 1). It would be amazing if Alteryx had something similar (Example 2).

What are yall's thoughts?

-Nick

PS. the idea label tool doesn't work very well

Example1

Example2

There are some minor tools like Twitter Search (http://www.alteryx.com/resources/blending-social-media-data-without-it) and Grazitti's Facebook Page crawler...

But we need tools for accessing and blending more of the existing semi-structure social data,

• no YouTube connector to search between videos and track impressions yet...
  
• no LinkedIn connector to crawl public and full profiles (with permission) to do HR analytics yet...
• no Instagram connector yet, to crawl marketing data and do trends and competition search
• no Flickr connector to grab pictures to do Image search and recognition...

Top social media sites Updated February 1, 2017;

1 | Facebook 1,100,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors
2 | YouTube 1,000,000,000

3 | Twitter 310,000,000

4 | LinkedIn 255,000,000
5 | Pinterest 250,000,000

6 | Google Plus+  120,000,000

7 | Tumblr 110,000,000

8 | Instagram100,000,000
9 | Reddit 85,000,000

10 | VK 80,000,000

11 | Flickr 65,000,000

12 | Vine 42,000,000
13 | Meetup 40,000,000

14 | Ask.fm 37,000,000

15 | ClassMates 15,000,000

The ability to limit the number of records (either on a specific input tool, or via the Workflow Properties) is super useful when developing a workflow...

...but how many times do you forget that a record limit was set and then spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out why something isn't working properly? (I can't be the only person this has happened to...).

Wouldn't it be fantastic if a warning/message was shown in the workflow results (e.g. "Input Tool (n) has a record limit set"
or "Record Limits are set on the Workflow Properties")?

Right now, I have to do a little voodoo to get a user to select a sheet within an excel doc to use as a source.  My use case is that I have an excel file provided by other users in which the relevant data could be in one of many excel sheets, and there isn't a good programmatic way to determine the right sheet.  Thus, I want to prompt my user to select the sheet when running an analytic app.

I have to start with a file browse option to prompt the user for the excel:

From here, the prompt will only ask for a file:

At no point will it prompt for the sheet it wants within the file.  And the action options don't give you the ability to change the sheet (it reads it from the file input after the pipe):

To solve this, I have to create a app that only prompts for the excel sheet and then set it to output the sheet names.  From there, I do a little formula magic to split it into key-value pairs with the value being the entire file path pipe concatenated with the sheet name, save it to a file, then read the file in a second workflow which presents the sheet names in drop downs.  It looks something like this:

This all seems unnecessarily complex given Alteryx seems to have already figured this out in designer:

My idea:  Use the same file selector in the "Input Data" tool for the File Browser when setting the File value from an Action.  It would save me from having a separate workflow just to prompt a user for an excel sheet.

Thanks!

As part of our documentation process, we'd like to save the documented image of the Alteryx workflow to a OneNote project folder. However, the image quality of the Print->Send to OneNote option is too low to capture many of our processes.

It would really help the project documentation process if we could increase the image resolution of the output image so that the workflow can be zoomed in to and seen clearly. I think this could be achieved by either enabling larger paper sizes in the Page Setup, or by giving the ability to increase the DPI of the outputted image.

I would love to see Alteryx add an indicator whenever a number being displayed is being truncated. For example, this picture is currently confusing:

The displayed numbers should all be equal according to their displayed value, but in reality a different number is being stored in the background. I would propose something like this:

1) Any number that is being truncated when displayed would have that red triangle in the upper right corner. This already happens when a formula tool result is truncated, but I would like for it to be displayed on all data.

2) Clicking on the cell would show the actual value, not the truncated value. This would be great when debugging.

I understand that numbers are more complex than meets the eye, and I think that changes like this would help alleviate some of the mystery (like why 2 of my numbers above aren't equal).

Hi ,

Price Elasiticity is an important topic in Retail Business. I have browsed over the net trying to find an optimal methodology to calculate Elasticity mainly in a retail Setting, where we have Point of Sale, Transactional data.

Can we develop a tool for the same?

Currently, when choosing the "<List Of Sheet Names>" options for excel files, Alteryx always does an implicit sort of the sheets when outputting the list.  For some of my excel files I need to read, the order of the sheets in the excel is important.  But Alteryx will always perform a sort, without me being able to know what the original order was.  And yes, one of those fun situations where I don't control the excel sheet.

It would be nice when selecting this option to either preserve the order of the sheets or somehow include an additional column that numbers the order the sheet was in.

It would be nice to have the option to overlay multiple addresses to find  marketing opportunities within the heatmap. Currently I have to map the addresses elsewhere and click back and forth between tabs to see where they lay within the chosen variables.