Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Can you add an ExceptionHandler to the Tile Tool? The tool crashed on a large dataset.  I got an Error: Tile (1): No values found before GetMean() on the tile tool. I selected Smart Tile option on the ‘unique_zips_count’ field and grouped by ‘ID’.
To track the problem down, I had to use the sample tool to grab x number of recs and see if it would run through the Tile tool. I had to keep skipping and selecting first N recs until I narrowed the problem down to 20 records. As it turned out. all values were 0 in a specific group. I found a workaround by pulling all recs per group with a value of 0 and bypassing these with the Tile tool. Instead of doing that - could you add an ExceptionHandler and specify which RecNo it crashed on?

Can you also add option to use 1, 2, or 3 std dev in addition to smart? This way all my groups will be uniform.
  

I think there should be a tool that allows you to produce grand totals for any numeric field you want. In the tool, you should be able to check off the fields you wish to be totaled at the bottom. I prefer this over having to use the summary tool and then using the union tool to produce totals at the bottom of my output. 

After developing complicated workflows (using over 200 tools and over 30 inputs and outputs) in my DEV or QA environment, I need to switch over to Production to deploy it, but it's incredibly annoying to have to change 30 data inputs individually from QA to Prod, DEV to QA, etc. If I need to go back to QA to change something and re-test, I have to do it all again. etc.etc.

I need a way to be able to change mass amounts of data sources at once or at least make the process a lot more streamlined to make it bearable. Otherwise it is incredibly difficult to work within multiple environments.

In the Alteryx SharePoint list tool, Alteryx fails to authenticate using to connect to SharePoint list that is protected by ADFS. There Sharepoint sites outside of our company's firewall that use ADFS for authentication.  We would like to connect to those sites via the Sharepoint List tool.

Curl currently doesn't have Secure protocols supported. Please find below screen-shot. We are currently using Alteryx 11.7.6

 

 

 

Can Alteryx take this as feature request and add the secure libraries to existing cURL tool so that it can support the secure SFTP protocol.

 

Hi, I've seen some requests lately where the users are requesting maps in  EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format, which is an

Adobe Illustrator file type. If this could be added as a Report Render output type, along with BMP, it would make the tool even more useful. Thanks!

Was thinking with my peers at work that it might be good to have join module expanded both for desktop and in-database joins.

 

As for desktop join: left and right join shows only these records that are exclusive to that side of operation. Would it be possible to have also addition of data that is in common?

As for in-db join: db join acts like classic join (left with matching, right with matching data). Would it be possible to get as well only-left, only-right join module?

 

 

I'm using .sv file format for compressing large files and using them in Alteryx.  .sv is call a Alteryx Spatial Zip file.  This format seems to offer the highest level of compression of all the Alteryx file format types.  Is this suitable for text also?  Is it usable in real time vs uncompressing first then using in a workflow?  If not, I think a compressed real time file format would be a nice addition.

I love the new Basic Filter option and it makes writing filters easy/self-expanatory for new users and helps with functions like isnull(). However, I'm almost always writing what are now called 'Custom Filters' and it takes two clicks to do this.

From a User Experience perspective it would be great if you could click in the expression box to write the filter rather than having to check the customer filter check box, or start by creating a basic filter and then make it more complex using the custom filter box without having to check the tick box.

Following on from this and something that is probably a lot harder to implement - But with the new basic filter, it would be great to have a list of available fields populate the options to filter by - Similar to the option that you get in Calgary. E.g Country == and then the drop down list would contain whatever is available in the data (e.g. Spain, UK, USA, Etc...)

Can an interactive mapping tool be added as an output tool? 

When reports, files, or tables are generated, it would help to be able to view them on an interactive map.  Currently I am trying to show where high population growth is located for large areas, ie-entire US, entire State(s), etc., so the user needs to view where these areas are on a map.  Ideally, it would be nice to have additional layers seen on the map as well, for example, our current locations, competitor locations, etc.

Please have the Calgary Tools put the file names in the annotation automatically like all other input/output tools. 

NOTE: There are other Idea posts for improvement of the Browse Profiling functionality, but I did not find anything specific to this and feel these ideas should be segregated anyway. 

 

I just discovered that the plot in the Browse tool profiling section when plotting numeric values has differing behavior. 

According to the documentation, "Once more than 10,000 unique values are profiled, binning is applied to increase performance and to represent data in a a more meaningful way."

What this means is that for numeric data, a scatterplot is shown if there are less than 10,000 unique values, and a frequency plot (bar chart) is shown if more than 10,000 unique values. There is then an indication that "Only the top 20 unique values are shown". 

 

I can see where with some situations (e.g., an integer value), a frequency plot that shows the more predominant values would be a good thing to see.

 

However I would argue that a frequency plot of numeric data that is basically a “double” data type can be pretty meaningless…since out of 10,001 values, you might have 10,001 UNIQUE values…so you end up with a frequency plot that is not of much value (where as the scatterplot would still allow a user to see the dispersion of the ENTIRE data set).

 

I’ve attached an example to easily show this.

 

It would be great if the user could choose the plot he wants for a specific set of data…similar to the choices that occur when a date field is present in the data.

I came across the Find Replace Tool when I needed to find values from a column in one table in a column in another table. My first instance to solve the problem was to write a batch macro with a contains function in a formula followed by a not null filter (see attachment). This worked perfectly besides the fact that it was slow. Then I got excited when I discovered the Find Replace Tool accomplishes the same thing WAY faster, but I was wrong.

 

What I would love is the equivalent of an SQL query like this:

 

SELECT

    A.1

    B.1

FROM A

    INNER JOIN

        B

    ON A.1 LIKE "%" || B.2 || "%"

 

which is a legal query in SQLite and is equal to the output of the attached macro. This is what I wish the Find Replace tool could do (Or a different tool), but it only finds one instance per "Find Within Field" value. The tools decision making doesn't line up with the decision-making that I need, for example it doesn't return the longest values found, instead the one with the first key to appear in the field. One way I've found to configure it better is to string a number of these together, that will give me a better result but still won't find every instance and uses 90 or so tools when I feel I should only need 1-3 to accomplish the same thing.

 

Instead of an Inner Join, the Find Replace is more like of Left Outer Join followed by a Unique() on A.1. Is there a way to accomplish this out-of-database in Alteryx?

There are several tools and tool categories that I have limited knowledge of.  It would be a nice feature to be able to right click on a tool and in addition to  "help",  have an option to view a video (on-line) overview of the tool or tool category  including examples of using the tool

It would be helpful to have a unique feature within Calgary in order to return a unique count or a data extract. The current Crss count will error if there are two many rows.

Currently there are bulk loaders within alteryx for Teradata, Oracle and SQL Server.
It would be great to have a bulk loader for AWS Redshift in order to fully industrialize the workflow instead of using AWS S3 and then use a separate AWS Datapipeline for scheduling

When I maximize the SQL Editor Window within the Input Tool only half of the screen show the SQL window.  The bottom half of the screen is useless grey space.  Why not have most all of the screen be the SQL window and only a small portion of grey border for the Test Qry, Ok, Cancel and Help button?  I'd like to see more SQL and less wasted space.  Thanks!

When using the Levenshtein distance matching in the fuzzy match it gives you the option to select a match threshold % but does not allow for other options.  Is it possible to provide these additional options in a future release?

 

It would be good if in the date format option for the Parse tools etc, if there was an option for the 1900 date format used sometimes in Excel/SQL. This is where the date is represented as the number of days from 1/1/1900. If this support was added then the same support for time be represented as a decimal {0,1} would be good as well. Besides this being a nice addition to the software, it would also help with any workarounds stemming from an excel file being open when imported causing the format to come through differently. (Currently if the Excel input file is open in the background which can happen on network available files, the time comes in to Alteryx asa decimal and the date appears as 1900 format).