Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

We primarily work on tracking people through a store or any physical space and extract shopping trip information such as areas visited, dwell time, etc. This shopper track information consists of a series of X,Y coordinates which are also used to plot heat maps based on density of points in a given area.

I have been using a workaround due to the lack of cartesian coordinate support in spatial tools - involving converting cartesian values to Lat., Long. by dividing X,Y values by 10,000. This approach works fine for finding spatial matches between points and polygons. However, when using something like a heat map tool which requires Grid Size and Max Distance in Miles/Kilometers, since there is no support for smaller units of distance, you will not be able to generate a heatmap data file.

In addition to adding support for Cartesian coordinates, it would also be helpful to provide an option to load in a Floorplan/Image as Base Map when browsing Spatial tool results.

When attempting to connect to an oracle database, if the connection is unsuccesful, nothing happens so you just sit and stare and wait for the SQL window to pop up.  It would be helpful if there was an error message to tell you that the connection was unsuccesful.

Once you get the hang of it, Alteryx is great at producing reports. Unfortunately, each item has its own XML parameters, like font size, colors, table defaults, etc. As it stands now, if I want to make a change across the course of a complex, multi-page report, I have to update the settings in each table and chart.

I'd love it if I could have a 'Styles' module that I could set, then copy and paste and insert after each table. From that point, I suppose you could make parameters out of style options and build them into a bigger module. For now, though, some kind of reusable style would be invaluable.

We frequently report on our data by week. However, the DateTimeTrim function (in the Formula Tool and others) does not support this trim type.

Some workarounds have been posted that involve calculating the day of the week and then subtracting it out:

http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Summarize-data-by-the-week/td-p/6002

It would be very helpful to update DateTimeTrim as follows:

• Add a <trim type> of 'week' 
• Add an optional parameter for <start of week>
  • Default value: 0 (Week beginning Sunday)
  • Other values: 1 (Week beginning Monday), 2 (Week beginning Tuesday), etc.

I often have many tool containers, which I have to constantly manage locations of so they do not overlap, etc.   It would be much easier to have the option to have a tabbed tool container. 

I often find when building a big workflow that I need to cancel its running in order to tweak something, but I still want to know which element was making it slow/crashing the workflow.

What would be useful in this circumstance is for the performance profiling to work even on partially finished (e.g. cancelled) workflows. It could just display a message reminding that this is a percentage of things that have run so far.

Currently if a user has multiple connections in a workflow that connect to a password-protected source, and that password changes, the user will be locked out of their account by login attempts as Alteryx attempts to validate the connection.

Today I had to manually edit the XML of another user's workflow in order to remove references to their server, so they could correct their password without locking the account for a third time today.

While I understand that aliases are a good workaround to this problem, the issue still has potential to occur.

Having an option to load a workflow in a "SECURE" or "SAFE" mode, where it would not validate a query until runtime, or refreshing the metadata manually, would help to significantly reduce lockouts which would improve the usability of the tool.

Currently the OLEDB/ODBC connection string for a server that requires a password can be injected into with a password that contains a ; or a |.  There may be other values that cause this as well - these are the ones our company has found so far.

This lowers the security of passwords for our other systems, by limiting what characters we can use.

I find the Run Command tool to be counter-intuitive: rather than supplying a required I/O parameter (in at least one of "Write Source" and/or "Read Results"), I would rather just use a "Block Until Done" approach to 1. write file, 2. issue custom system command, 3. read file.  An even simpler example is the case where I don't need I/O to/from the system command... in that case, I just want to issue the command, nothing more.  But the current tool will require me to specify a dummy file, which is counter-intuitive and also leaves that unnecessary file somewhere.

To fix this up without breaking existing user implementations, the "idea" is:

• Do not require either "Write Source" or "Read Result" ... allow both to be blank.
• Allow (but don't require) any of "Command," "Command Arguments," and "Working Directory" to be dynamically populated from fields in the data streamed into the tool.

So... any existing user implementation should be unnaffected... but these changes would allow users to implement system commands in a more intuitive manner, and even allow for very dynamic system commands based on the workflow.

Thanks!

There are cases where a batch macro is used for multiple tasks where not all of the control parameter inputs are available all of the time. To use a batch macro control parameter it must be populated with a field, meaning sometimes a field containing a dummy value may have to be created to work-around this forced populating.

It would be useful if control parameter inputs could be made optional, passing a NULL value when a field hasn't been provided and handling any NULLs passed in within the batch macro.

In version 10.5 if the taskbar is auto-hidden and alteryx is the active window - you cannot access the taskbar by moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen.

You have to use the windows key or switch to another application window

I would love to see a detailed change log to help when I encounter issues after upgrading from one version to the next. For concrete examples, I've come across these issues recently:

1) Files saved to %TEMP% were displayed to the end user in the 10.0 but not 10.1 when running in the gallery. 

2) The cross tab in 10.1 would run with a warning if you had column heading of "p_d" and "p d" where the space in the latter item is changed to a _ and then one of them is renamed with a 2 at the end ("p_d" and "p_d2").  In 10.5 you now get a warning and an error and the workflow stops. I've attached a sample workflow.

I'm all for bugs getting fixed and the improvements not always being backwards compatible, but I struggle with some of these when I can't reference a detailed change log. For some context, I've also attached a change log from some other software I used in a previous life. Anytime that a change in coding could affect past results, there was a note in the change log to identify these changes to the end user.

The ability to directly edit the XML for tools is fantastic.

Would love an edit option on the XML view for the workflow.

One slight issue on the tool one is that it doesnt run through the Config UI so the Annotation is not recomputed. Would be useful if the annotation was recomputed post XML edit.

Hi there,

Just a quick note on a really small improvement that could be made on the Data Cleansing tool but that could help a lot.

Actually this tool allows us to convert input data with NULLs to either blank or 0 values depending on the datatype.

It would be really appreciated to be able to do the opposite, converting blank or 0 values to NULLs.

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

Please provide an option to have a the caption of a tool container sent to log/results after all items within it have been processed.

When you press tab from from the Test Type combo jumps to the Ok box, think should go to Test Value text box

It would make it a lot easier to create and manage a work stream if you added the standard ability to maximize and minimize the workflow canvas and configuration and results windows.