Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Often when working on problems posed by other people, they provide a sample table of data.

Would love a trivial way to copy from the Community to Alteryx.

Example:

If I want to create the 'Clean Equipment ID" I would have to use a complicated RegEx expression. Wouldnt it be easier for the end-user to have a function to do so? Like Exclude(string,character)?

In this case it could be: exclude([equipment id],"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ") and if I wanted just letters it could be exclude([equipment id],"0123456789").

It would be very helpful to have a SOQL Edit textbox for the entire SOQL statement not just the WHERE clause.   This would allow us to select fields based on parent or child relationships to the table as well.

Hello, I am very new to Alteryx, so my suggestion might appear elementary for the veteran-users. From the standpoint of adoptation by less technical people (moving from Excel to Alteryx), would it be possible to take common scenarios of Fuzzy Matching and automate them?

For example, if you have 2 databases and you want to match and clean them up, you have to have close to 10 steps, with sorting, adding unique identifiers, joining, fuzzy matching, etc. Just look at your video named "Fuzzy Matching" or other videos for Tableau+Alteryx. They idea is basic. If you know most common use cases and you have already developed a methodology for how to solve these cases, why not have them as part of the tools library?

Also, when matching, for example universities, wouldn't it be easier if all those common, aka appearing many times, words were automatically suggested to be removed from the "match". Example: University A and Univeristy B are two different Universities, but they share the common word "University". While it's important that this word is there, it is not the reason to pair these two together. Maually going through and identifying and typing these common words is an extra step. It would be much easier to have a pop list of these common words and the count of records in which they appear, sorted by the count, and a check box to include or exclude the words.

Thank you,

Olga

Link to the Fuzzy Matching video. Check Minute 9:41.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZiM2YSCCY&index=13&list=PLfSLx4WE4q52YoGEzJEBalfNou6jfRTF0&nohtml5...

Hi everybody! As you can read here I had the necessity to insert a macro (publish to tableau server) at the end of a self-made app.

I have actually found 2 different ways to solve the problem:

1) Turn the macro into an app and use 2 chained apps.

2) Copy and paste tools (normal and interface) from the macro to my app.

Both solution work, but both require some (quite a lot to be honest) editing and re-work that actually is already done. It's kind of like to re-invent the wheel!

A quick way to merge 2 configuration interfaces would be really usefull.

It would be nice if I had a workflow that had multiple paths to be able to run only one line of it.  This would allow me to only run what I needed so instead of having to run the entire workflow, I would be able to run up to a certain point and only run tools that are required to get to that point.  

Other tools that I have used allow you to determine where you are caching from so instead of always having to cache at the input, you could cache after a big join.  This would be great for efficiency as having to run everything through the entire workflow every time is innefficient and I end up spending a lot of time waiting for my workflow to go through the same tools.  

Hey guys!!

I was just thinking... they might not need to fully build out a python ide, but could still reach the same objective.

You should be able to keep a python file on its own and call it in r.  By doing this, you might be able to have the json/xml handling of python with the visual/stats power of R while it being nicely bundled in your workflow.  This uses base functions in r and does a good job turning a pandas dataset to an r dataframe you can move along your workflow.

You could always just use this same idea to write a file somewhere and once it's written, your workflow will continue.  If you do, the code is literally 1 line in r...  Anyway, let me know your thoughts! 🙂

Will this work for your organization?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-python-r-windows-7-subhash-jaini?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publ...

In the designer it would be nice if the projection of a .shp file could automatically be read by its corresponding .prj file.

There is a great functionality in Excel that lets users "seek" a value that makes whatever chain of formulas you might have work out to a given value. Here's what Microsoft explains about goal seek: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-Goal-Seek-to-find-a-result-by-adjusting-an-input-value-...

My specific example was this:

In the excel (attached), all you have to do is click on the highlighted blue cell, select the “data” tab up top and then “What-if analysis” and finally “goal seek.” Then you set the dialogue box up to look like this:

 Set cell: G9

To Value: 330

By changing cell" J6

And hit “Okay.” Excel then iteratively finds the value for the cell J6 that makes the cell G9 equal 330. Can I build a module that will do the same thing? I’m figuring I wouldn’t have to do it iteratively, if I could build the right series of formulas/commands. You can see what I’m trying to accomplish in the formulas I’ve built in Excel, but essentially I’m trying to build a model that will tell me what the % Adjustment rate should be for the other groups when I’ve picked the first adjustment rate, and the others need to change proportionally to their contribution to the remaining volume.

There doesn't really seem to be a way to do this in Alteryx that I can see. I hate to think there is something that excel can do that Alteryx can't!

Just ran into this today.  I was editing a local file that is referenced in a workflow for input.

When I tried to open the workflow, Alteryx hangs.

When I closed the input file, Alteryx finished loading the workflow.

If the workflow is trying to run, I can understand this behavior but it seems odd when opening the workflow.

Dear Alteryx

Typing econometric formulas within the Formula tools can be very tyring when formulas are long and complex

What would be very nice, would be to have the possibility the get a a kind of "Formula" format (in adition to double , string, datetime ...).

When the format is set to Formula, Alteryx automatically detect that it is a formula and use it as such.

It would allow to import easily external models formulas without to type or paste them within Alteryx

Many thanks

Arno

Hi,

Today I pressed F1 in the Output Tool to find out what the setting Transaction Size does. It turned out that this is not documented.

It would be a great idea to make a documentation that covers the options of a tool.

Regards,

Frank 

Can you devise a way to bring out the dynamic network visualisation on to Powerpoint.  Right now, we can only see a static image on a browser