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Anchoring comment boxes to tools

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

 

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

 

Alteryx Community Idea.gif

 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

 

10 Comments
patrick_digan
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

@cgoodman3 I love this. Annotations are locked to the tool, but don't have all of the functionality of comment boxes. Locking comment boxes to a tool would be a best of both worlds situation. 

mbarone
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Love this idea.  I often spend time shifting them around to accommodate.

CristonS
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

hi @cgoodman3, great observation on tool functionality, and nice work on that gif : )  When this submission meets the necessary criteria, we can push it to our Product team for review. Thanks!

MikeLR
8 - Asteroid

I love this idea and it would be such a time saver. I spend so much time moving comment boxes around at the moment.

Kenda
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

This would be so helpful!

DanielG
12 - Quasar

I like this idea.  Aesthetic maintenance is a real struggle for me.  🙂

haraldharders
9 - Comet

I use the comment field of the tool itself for this type of description. That moves with the tool...

CristonS
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: Not Planned

Thanks for posting to the Alteryx Community. Your idea is very interesting, but we have determined that at this time the idea is not something we are planning to do. If at some point we feel that this idea is something we are interested in creating we will change the status “Under Review.”

 

DavidP
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Yes!!!!! I never realised how much I needed this until now @cgoodman3!!!

ISully
6 - Meteoroid

I would like this a lot! I want to put quite a bit of documentation sometimes with a tool and using the annotations would make the workflow look too cumbersome. I like the idea of locked comment boxes because I can put them in a container to collapse and expand. Another option would be to change the annotations to have one set of text that always displayed but a separate set of text that only displayed when hovering on the tool or when clicking on the tool.