Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I sometimes find that a workflow would be more efficient if I swapped the order of a couple tools. It would be cool if we could select 2 tools and then right-click or something to swap them.

It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).

See this picture which worth thousand words.

Like PDF Reader and Tableau Reader wherein things can't be edited but users (at large scale) can execute pre-designed content and business logic can interactively use it; I'd like to propose Alteryx Executor as free platform for the end users. Once the business logic has been designed on the designer, the alteryx wizard/ app/ workflow can be handed over to the clients for easier adaptability.

These days I get my work done easily though Alteryx and it creates client delight and once they also want to have it for their production usage - they push me to convert it all into MS Office/ SQL/ Python platforms. Which ends up into very inefficient usage as well as drop in adoption of Alteryx. I've significantly dropped using Alteryx and have stopped encouraging others to use as end state is extrememly painful.

What's Alteryx is doing about it? USD 3500 is a lot of money to shed for data blending and analysis tool each year for the license whereas lot of freeware like Sisense/ Pentaho/ Python is available to the clients for their usage.

When you have multiple workflows open in tabs and want to rearrange them, it's kind of hard to tell where the tab is. In Firefox and Chrome, as examples, the tabs move around as you drag - if you drag a tab left, the tab next to it will slide to the right. In Tableau, a line with an arrow appears in the location where the tab will be dropped. But in the Alteryx interface, the new location of the tab is not so obvious. A line or something at the destination point would be great!

Chaos reigns within. Repent, reflect and reboot. Order shall return.

For those of us really old school, this would be a novel Easter egg to add

It would be great if there was an option in the configuration of the Output Tool to create the output directory if it doesn't already exist. Maybe also to append instead of overwrite for all file types too?

I think in case we can have a feature at workflow level to check if the entire logic written inside an Alteryx workflow can be converted into a native language, there can be performance improvements in terms of avoiding too and fro between App (here Alteryx) level and DB level.

For e.g. if I am using Oracle as my source connection and target connection as well, and the transformations done in Alteryx can be pushed down to a DML statement (or some loop with commit interval set) to execute within Oracle itself, we might be able to get performance improvements as the overhead of pulling data from Oracle to Alteryx and that of pushing it back from Alteryx to Oracle can be avoided.

Hi,

I have a suggestion for selecting multiple tools. You currently have it to where the user can hold down Ctrl and select multiple tools one at a time. Could you take it the next step and allow the user to hold Ctrl and then click and drag over multiple tools, then go to another area while still holding Ctrl and click and drag to select multiple tools again.

For example, I would first click and drag over these tools:

Then hold down Ctrl and click and drag over these tools (I’m trying to select the 5 tools without grabbing the Filter tool and it’s 2 Browses):

Please ignore this post! I just discovered the amazing dynamic input tool can accomplish exactly this 🙂

This is no longer a "good future idea" but simply a solution already provided by AlterYX!  Thanks AlterYX!

Hello everyone. I think it would be incredibly helpful if all input tools (database / csv files / etc..)  had an input stream for data processing.  

This input stream would cause the tool to fire if and only if at least 1 row of "data" was passed into it.  This would work similar to the Email tool, as the input would simply not fire if no records in the workflow were passed into it.

By making this change, AlterYX could then control the flow of execution when reading / writing to database tables and files without having to bring in Macros or chained applications.

The problem with having to use batch macros and block until done to solve this problem is that it obfuscates your workflow logic, making it much harder for another developer to look at the workflow and understand what is happening.   Below is an extremely simply example of where this is necessary.

Example: any time you are doing a standard dimentional warehouse ETL.

Step #1: Write data to a table with an auto-incremented Key

Step #2: Read back from that table to get the Key that you just generated

Step #3:  use that key as a foreign key in your primary Fact table.

Without this enhancment you need at least 2 different workflows (chained apps or marco's) to accomplish the task above, however with this simple enhancement the above task could be accomplished in 3 tools.

This task is the basic building block of almost all ETL's so this enhancement would be very useful in my opinion.

Hi,

I am wondering if it is possible to add search function in the browse tool/preview results. It would be easier to locate the key words and not necessarily to add filter for checking and re-run the workflows for extra number of times.

Another thing is about the connectors, is it possible to allow manual adjustment on the connecters or the positions of the tool container? It would be great to adjust the lines when handling complex workflows.

Thanks.

Kenneth

In addition to the existing functionality, it would be good if the below functionality can also be provided.

1) Pattern Analysis

This will help profile the data in a better way, help confirm data to a standard/particular pattern, help identify outliers and take necessary corrective action.

Sample would be - for emails translating 'abc@gmail.com' to 'nnn@nnnn.nnn', so the outliers might be something were '@' or '.' are not present.
Other example might be phone numbers, 12345-678910 getting translated to 99999-999999, 123-456-78910 getting translated to 999-999-99999, (123)-(456):78910 getting translated to (999)-(999):99999 etc.

It would also help to have the Pattern Frequency Distribution alongside.

So from the above example we can see that there are 3 different patterns in which phone numbers exist and hence it might call for relevant standadization rules.

2) More granular control of profiling

It would be good, that, in the tool, if the profiling options (like Unique, Histogram, Percentile25 etc) can be selected differently across fields.

A sub-idea here might also be to check data against external third party data providers for e.g. USPS Zip validation etc, but it would be meaningful only for selected address fields, hence if there is a granular control to select type of profiling across individual fields it will make sense.

Note - When implementing the granular control, would also need to figure out how to put the final report in a more user friendly format as it might not conform to a standard table like definition.

3) Uniqueness

With on-going importance of identifying duplicates for the purpose of analytic results to be valid, some more uniqueness profiling can be added.

For example - Soundex, which is based on how similar/different two things sound.
Distance, which is based on how much traversal is needed to change one value to another, etc.

So along side of having Unique counts, we can also have counts if the uniqueness was to factor in Soundex, Distance and other related algorithms.

For example if the First Name field is having the following data -

Jerry
Jery
Nick
Greg
Gregg

The number of Unique records would be 5, where as the number of soundex unique might be only 3 and would open more data exploration opportunities to see if indeed - Jerry/Jery, Greg/Gregg are really the same person/customer etc.

4) Custom Rule Conformance

I think it would also be good if some functionality similar to multi-row formula can be provided, where we can check conformance to some custom business rules.

For e.g. it might be more helpful to check how many Age Units (Days/Months/Year) are blank/null where in related Age Number(1,10,50) etc are populated, rather than having vanila count of null and not null for individual (but related) columns.

Thanks,

Rohit

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.