Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

For some workflows I see the value of concentrate a high number of formulas in a single Formula Tool, specially when you have a considerable number of simple and independent formulas. This makes future changes to the workflow easier, since you (and other in your team) know where exactly to find the formulas in a workflow. But as higher the number of formulas in Formula Tool, more difficult is to find a specific formula in the tool.

My suggestion is to implement a sort option - so you list the formulas/columns alphabetically - and/or a filter option - bringing the relevant formulas/columns as you type. 

Since I am relatively new in the Alteryx world,I am not sure if there is an alternative for that (officially or unofficially speaking).

Thanks. 

I would like the functionality to configure my own installation media for my companies environment. For example, I want send new users to a link where they can install Alteryx designer that automatically turns on phone home data with our gallery information and installs any company wide macros that are relevant for the users. Then I would like to be able to push any periodic updates to all the designers in our company. For example, if Alteryx comes out with a new version that I want to deploy or if I come out with new macros that I want to deploy I can deploy across all users easily from the server. Obviously the ability to roll back updates would be needed as well.   

Add input of ArcGrid file format.

I work for a company that is still running v 10.5. It takes some time for us to go through acceptance testing / approval for new versions of software, and therefore we will only upgrade to version 11 in November at the earliest.  At the moment there is a warning just above the workflow stating that a newer version of Alteryx designer is available, which decreases the size of the workflow canvas etc. There is a dropdown to to defer this warning for a period of time (90 days/1 year etc), but this appears to make no difference as the warning shows on every startup of Alteryx. It would be great for this warning to be removed/the deferral to actually work as it becomes old pretty quickly when I have to remove this warning on every startup.

Thanks!

Has anyone tried to build a flow that goes from right to left?

If possible, it would be very helpful if the Schedule Workflow window that a user activates to schedule a workflow on the server showed which version is currently running on the server. This will help avoid the version incompatibility issues when a user has upgraded to a higher version than is currently running on the server. Also, for companies that have just started using a server and all the version control processes and guidelines and not yet in place this would be very helpful. Thanks for the consideration. 

Slightly off the track, but definitely needed...

I'd like like to propose a novel browsing.

With this new feature you may no longer require the traditional Browse Tool, to the extent that it may be decommissioned later. Here's how new Browse would work.

So far Browse Tool is helpful for mid-stream data sanity check...

But a complex workflow will need so many Browse Tools, thereby wasting a lot of canvas space and unnecessarily complicating / slowing the workflow further.

Expected Browse:

Clicking on any tool should automatically populate its results in the Results window without the need of Browse Tool.

1) Tools with a single output: Clicking on the tool or its output plug should reveal its data (ex: Summarize Tool)

2) Tools with more than one output: Clicking on each of the output plug should reveal its data (ex: Join)

BONUS: Clicking on the input plug of a tool should reveal its input data

Imagine We have following o/p fields like Name,RegNo,Mark1,Mark2 ,total

Here total can be computed and can be brought as derived field using formula tool.

However  Name and RegNo will be the same in O/p too.

• Instead of Mapping Manually mapping Output_Name to Input_Name, A smart Mapping feature can be introduced so that it can automatically map based on name of the columns.
• Once smart mapping is done,Developer can review and make changes if needed.
• This will reduce the manual intervention of selecting from existing fields.
• Will be helpful when we process 100s of Input data into Output report.

Thanks,

Krishna

Please consider displaying the count of records identified by the tool in the image of the tool on the workflow screen.  

This will save time when analyzing data: I will no longer need to copy and paste the values into a comment.  The value will be "captured" because I tend to print these particular work flows as pdf's.

Thanks,

Nick

I would love to have the ability to easily populate an entire schema of tables into my work space without having to perform repetitive connections to individual tables. 

Ideally, this would include the ability to drag a schema onto the workflow and have all of the connection tools auto-populate.

I often have  a need to investigate data in many tables to verify its presence / validate the table contents. This would be a very helpful feature for completing this easily and completely.

Thank you!

Cisco, which has been building enterprise networks, and is literally close to the Internet of Things, is creating some data products, perhaps a platform, perhaps a suite, to handle big data. Part of their offering is DNA Data Virtualization (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/dna-virtualization/index.html). Compare Cisco at 75,000 employees to SAS at 15,000. 

Hi,

Love the new Select tool column view, going back to the whole column name showing up...AWESOME!! I was wondering if the same could be applied to the Summarize tool. I'm on Alteryx 11.0 and the column names within the tool are truncated (like the Select tool used to be), can you also format it to where the whole column name appears in the tool?

Thanks!!

Alteryx is extremely user friendly. It is simple to use, self explanatory, and manages to ride the difficult line in balancing pre-defined "canned" tools, yet allow enough user-customization to embrace advanced users' specific requirements. One area in which Alteryx could further improve upon though is additional options/inputs for users to change default tool and canvas settings, as well as improved overall formatting shortcuts.

One of the differences between a truly autonomous, ever-green, or "corporate" solution and a "user-specific workflow" are tool annotations, tool names, and the overall presentation of a workflow. Without annotations and/or a tool naming convention, any given workflow still requires significant time for any user to sit down and truly understand any given workflow. However, with the settings as-is, this can be extremely time consuming, tedious, and monotonous at times. This can be reconciled with some sort of inclusion of default settings that intelligently can use some sort of user-input settings to better annotate tool names beyond the current default, as well as tool names. Specifically - the default annotation settings are good in thought/design, but poor in practice. They clutter workflows, are truncated past the very first few lines, and are usually always changed in final workflow drafts. One solution would be to allow users to set default annotations for specific tools (i.e., "Calculated Fields" for formula bars, and/or no annotations ever even), and utilize the current default annotation settings used now and applied to a hint display box that appears when hovering over any given tool. A different solution may be as simple as taking only new calculated field names as the annotation, rather than each field and its formula. In that instance, I have yet to see any final workflows in which the default annotations for every tool are kept. An even better solution would be to have some sort of canvas view that allows users to make mass, stream-lined changes to tool and canvas formatting - i.e., select all formula tools, and apply a single user-input formatting schema. Select multiple tool boxes and adjust their visual appearance, etc. Other default settings that would be nice to adjust are toolbox and comment settings, as well as saving custom templates for toolboxes/comment boxes. This would just eliminate all the time in which we create similar templates over and over between workflows. This would de-clutter workflows, save needless time always removing/adjusting default annotations, and allow yet another "quirk" that separates Alteryx above the rest.

Again, these are just a few suggestions in which I feel Alteryx can continue to set the bar, and the standard for the rest of the industry. Thank you!

It would be extremely useful to be able to modify a tool parameter with a single row output from another tool within the same workflow.  My current solution is to use either the Append Fields tool or embed the other tool into a batch macro with a single row as the input.  This would greatly simplify workflows and allow for a much more robust "programmatic" approach to workflow development.

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.

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.

When you get an error message in an R tool it's almost impossible for a newbie to figure out what has just happened...

For eg. the normal R package randomForest sets 32 as a max number of classes for a given class variable

Thus when you happen to run randomForest on anything with > 32 classes you get an error, imposssible to figure out without searching on the net or better surfing on the community.

How about a basic rules checker providing message on the configs sayin;

"X" and "Y" variables are categoric and have more than 32 classes,

you have to fix thembefore running an RF tool in order to succeed"

In the same way In-DB generates SQL, might it be possible to have an In-PowerBI and generate DAX?

Hi,

As per our project, we need to publish the image into a PDF file which will be downloaded from web URL. when we download the image from web URL that will be saved as TIF format in our local machine. This TIF format is not being supported by Alteryx.

The tool needs an enhancement (to support TIFF) which can be used for converting tiff format to other  format OR directly tiff image should be usable in the report.

Thanks,

Raju Miyapuram