Alteryx Designer Ideas

Many software & hardware companies take a very quantitative approach to driving their product innovation so that they can show an improvement over time on a standard baseline of how the product is used today; and then compare this to the way it can solve the problem in the new version and measure the improvement.

For example:

- Database vendors have been doing this for years using TPC benchmarks (http://www.tpc.org/) where a FIXED set of tasks is agreed as a benchmark and the database vendors then they iterate year over year to improve performance based on these benchmarks

- Graphics card companies or GPU companies have used benchmarks for years (e.g. TimeSpy; Cinebench etc).

How could this translate for Alteryx?

- Every year at Inspire - we hear the stats that say that 90-95% of the time taken is data preparation

- We also know that the reason for buying Alteryx is to reduce the time & skill level required to achieve these outcomes - again, as reenforced by the message that we're driving towards self-service analytics & Citizen-data-analytics.

The dream:

Wouldn't it be great if Alteryx could say: "In the 2019.3 release - we have taken 10% off the benchmark of common tasks as measured by time taken to complete" - and show a 25% reduction year over year in the time to complete this battery of data preparation tasks?

One proposed method:

• Take an agreed benchmark set of tasks / data / problems / outcomes, based on a standard data set - these should include all of the common data preparation problems that people face like date normalization; joining; filtering; table sync (incremental sync as well as dump-and-load); etc.
• Measure the time it takes users to complete these data-prep/ data movement/ data cleanup tasks on the benchmark data & problem set using the latest innovations and tools
• This time then becomes the measure - if it takes an average user 20 mins to complete these data prep tasks today; and in the 2019.3 release it takes 18 mins, then we've taken 10% off the cost of the largest piece of the data analytics pipeline.

What would this give Alteryx?

This could be very simple to administer; and if done well it could give Alteryx:

- A clear and unambiguous marketing message that they are super-focussed on solving for the 90-95% of your time that is NOT being spent on analytics, but rather on data prep

- It would also provide focus to drive the platform in the direction of the biggest pain points - all the teams across the platform can then rally around a really deep focus on the user and accelerating their "time from raw data to analytics".   

- A competitive differentiation - invite your competitors to take part too just like TPC.org or any of the other benchmarks

What this is / is NOT:

• This is not a run-time measure - i.e. this is not measuring transactions or rows per second
• This should be focussed on "Given this problem; and raw data - what is the time it takes you, and the number of clicks and mouse moves etc - to get to the point where you can take raw data, and get it prepped and clean enough to do the analysis".
• This should NOT be a test of "Once you've got clean data - how quickly can you do machine learning; or decision trees; or predictive analytics" - as we have said above, that is not the big problem - the big problem is the 90-95% of the time which is spent on data prep / transport / and cleanup.

Loads of ways that this could be administered - starting point is to agree to drive this quantitatively on a fixed benchmark of tasks and data

@LibbyD ; @SteveA ; @JPoz ; @AshleyK ; @AJacobson ; @DerekK ; @Cimmel ; @TuvyL ; @KatieH ;  @TomSt ; @AdamR ; @APolly 

I would like to see more files types supported to be able to be dragged from a folder onto a workflow. More precisely a .txt and a .dat file. This will greatly help my team and I do be able to analyze new and unknown data files that we receive on a daily basis.  

Thank you. 

Dear GUI Gurus,

A minor, but time saving GUI enhancement would be appreciated.  When adding a tool to the canvas, the current behavior is to make visible the tool anchor that was last used on prior tools.  That being said, when I look at the results window, I might be adding a "vanilla" configuration tool to the canvas and stare at a BLANK results window.  When users are adding tools to the canvas, I suggest that the best practice is to VIEW the incoming data before configuring the tool.

I ALWAYS set the results to view the INCOMING DATA ANCHOR.

This minor change would be welcome to me.

Cheers,

Mark

Ref: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Is-there-a-search-in-quot-Choose-Table...

With large tables it is tedious to search for a field. It would be a great efficiency gain to allow a user to search for a column in a table by entering a name or partial column name. 

We don't have a seperate ANOVA tool in Alteryx, do you think of any reason?

It's not raw data or row blended data but insights gathered that's important:

Linear Regression Tool has a report for Type II ANOVA based on the model table we provide.

But both type II and other types are not available as standalone statistics tools...

Here is the list of different types of Anova that may be useful;

ANOVA models Definitions

Looking forward for the addition of ANOVA tools to the data investigation tool box...

Unsupervised learning method to detect topics in a text document.

Helpful for users interested in text mining.

On 2019.2.5.62427, interactive results grid is only available for the embedded result window but not if you open the results in new window 'Open results in New Window' -> New Window

This is verified by @PaulN - https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Interactive-Results-Grid-not-available...

It also appears that interactive grid is also not available if you double click a yxdb file to open it and view the content.

Would be useful to have the interactive grid in both these areas instead of just the embedded result window.

Similar to the Select tool's Unknown Field Checkbox, I figured it would be useful for the Data Cleansing tool to have this functionality as well in order to avoid a scenario where after a cross-tab you have a new numeric field, one of which has a Null value, so you can't total up multiple fields because the Null value will prevent the addition from happening. If the Unknown Field box were checked off in the Data Cleansing tool then this problem would be avoided.

This idea arose recently when working specifically with the Association Analysis tool, but I have a feeling that other predictive tools could benefit as well.  I was trying to run an association analysis for a large number of variables, but when I was investigating the output using the new interactive tools, I was presented with something similar to this:

While the correlation plot draws your high to high associations, the user is unable to read the field names, and the tooltip only provides the correlation value rather than the fields with the value.  As such, I shifted my attention to the report output, which looked like this:

While I could now read everything, it made pulling out the insights much more difficult.  Wanting the best of both worlds, I decided to extract the correlation table from the R output and drop it into Tableau for a filterable, interactive version of the correlation matrix.  This turned out to be much easier said than done.  Because the R output comes in report form, I tried to use the report extract macros mentioned in this thread to pull out the actual values.  This was an issue due to the report formatting, so instead I cracked open the macro to extract the data directly from the R output.  To make a long story shorter, this ended up being problematic due to report formats, batch macro pathing, and an unidentifiable bug.  

In the end, it would be great if there was a “Data” output for reports from certain predictive tools that would benefit from further analysis. While the reports and interactive outputs are great for ingesting small model outputs, at times there is a need to extract the data itself for further analysis/visualization.  This is one example, as is the model coefficients from regression analyses that I have used in the past.  I know Dr. Dan created a model coefficients macro for the case of regression, but I have to imagine that there are other cases where the data is desired along with the report/interactive output.

The sum function is probably the one I use most in the summarize tool. It is a silly thing, but it would be nice for "Sum" to be in the single-click list, rather than in the "Numeric" category...

Often in larger workflows, I will copy data partway down the stream into a new workflow in order to troubleshoot a small section in order to avoid having to run the workflow over and over again which can take a while. I'm aware (and thankful) of cacheing, but sometimes if there are many parallel streams or, I'd rather just copy the data from the data preview built into the tool so I don't have to take the time to run the workflow again. I'm also aware I could output a yxdb file and use that, but again that takes longer than I would like.

The issue I run into is if I copy the data and paste in a text input tool, all the field types change to what they would default to. This is fine with new data, but for data that has specific fields throughout the workflow, this can be a hassle. If copying data could also copy the field type and size that would be great.

Hi,

I wasted a good old chunk of time dealing with non-breaking spaces, and Alteryx could be improved by handling this automatically.

A space is a space, right?  Nope, there are spaces (ASCII value decimal 32) and there are non-breaking spaces (ASCII value decimal 160).  They look the same, but have slightly different behaviour in certain circumstances, like when text is auto-wrapped.

The DataCleansing tool cleans spaces, but leaves non-breaking spaces.

The Data Grid puts a warning on cells with leading or trailing spaces, but remains silent for non-breaking spaces.

I was trying to match two strings, that looked identical.  I had DataCleansed my cells, and the grid was showing me nothing wrong with the data.  In desperation, I copied the two data cells that I expected to match to a text editor (Textpad), and then examined the binary ASCII values of the data.  One cell had a trailing non-breaking space, and that caused the failure to match.

This was hard to find.  For someone less hopelessly nerdy, it would be practically impossible. 

As a small change, it might be really useful for Alteryx to include non-breaking spaces in it's definition of "space", such that DataCleansing tool removes it, and the Data Grid flags up the cell as having a leading or trailing space.

You could pick up non-breaking spaces from HTML, or from Excel.  I think mine came from a SQL script but I am not sure how it was there.  They are out there, and they will bite.

Python pandas dataframes and data types (numpy arrays, lists, dictionaries, etc.) are much more robust in general than their counterparts in R, and they play together much easier as well. Moreover, there are only a handful of packages that do everything a data scientist would need, including graphing, such as SciKit Learn, Pandas, Numpy, and Seaborn. After utliizing R, Python, and Alteryx, I'm still a big proponent of integrating with the Python language much like Alteryx has integrated with R. At the very least, I propose to create the ability to create custom code such as a Python tool. 

Right now - if a tool generates an error - there is nothing productive that you can do with the error rows, these are just sent to the error log and depending on your settings the entire canvas will fail.

Could we change this in the Designer to work more like SSIS - where almost every tool has an error output, so that you can send the good rows one way, and the error rows the other way, and then continue processing?    The error rows can be sent to an error table or workflow or data-quality service; and the good rows can be sent onwards.   Because you have access to the error rows, you can also do run stats of "successful rows vs. unsuccessful"

This would make a big difference in the velocity of developing a canvas or prepping data.

Can take some screenshots if that helps?

One of the tools that I use the most is the SELECT tool because I normally get large data sets with fields that I won't be using for a specific analysis or with fields that need re-naming. In the same way, sometimes Alteryx will mark a field in a different type than the one I need (e.g. date field as string). That's when the SELECT comes in handy.

However, often times when dealing with multiple sources and having many SELECT tools on your canvas can make the workflow look a little "crowded". Not to mention adding extra tools that will need later explanation when presenting/sharing your canvas with others. That is why my suggestion is to give the CONNECTION tool "more power" by offering some of the functionality found in the SELECT tool.

For instance, if one of the most used features of the SELECT tool is to choose the fields that will move through the workflow, then may be we can make that feature available in the CONNECTION tool. Similarly, if one of the most used features (by Alteryx users) is to re-name fields or change the field type, then may be we can make that available in the CONNECTION tool as well.

At the end, developers can benefit from speeding up workflow development processes and end-users will benefit by having cleaner workflows presented to them, which always help to get the message across.

What do you guys think? Any of you feel the same? Leave your comments below.

A question has been coming up from several users at my workplace about allowing a column description to display in the Visual Query Builder instead of or along with the column name. 

The column names in our database are based on an older naming convention, and sometimes the names aren't that easy to understand. We do see that (if a column does have a column description in metadata) it shows when hovering over the particular column; however, the consensus is that we'd like to reverse this and have the column description displayed with the column name shown on hover. 

It would be a huge increase to efficiency and workflow development if this could be implemented.

I have seen the Browse tool offering a basic level of profiling results in the profile table and also a basic data profile tool under Investigation category. But both of them lack the pattern profiling option. I would like to see a pattern profiling option inside Alteryx too, which can show the pattern distribution of column data something like below (This is from SQL Data Profile viewer).

This can be very helpful in checking the data quality, by picking up data anomalies and checking inconsistencies.

Hi all,

One if the most common data-investigation tasks we have to do is comparing 2 data-sets.   This may be making sure the columns are the same, field-name match, or even looking at row data.   I think that this would be a tremendous addition to the core toolset.   I've made a fairly good start on it, and am more than happy if you want to take this and extend or add to it (i give this freely with no claim on the work).

Very very happy to work with the team to build this out if it's useful

Cheers

Sean

It would often be very useful to have the ability to search for a field in a browse too.

At the moment i don't think there's an easy way to manually trace data through a workflow

For example you have created a workflow with various Joins, filters, etc. and notice that the final output is missing data for "ABC limited". The only way to find at what step ABC limited dropped out of the workflow is to add 10 filter tools branching out from before and after each step in the workflow's logic then re-run the workflow (which might take 5-10 minutes) to see if where "ABC limited" has gone. You fix the problem "ABC ltd" didn't join to "ABC Limited", but now you want to also check for XYZ limited so you have to manually edit all 10 filter tools. It seems you have fixed the problem, but now your workflow is a mess of 10 filter tools.

Alternatively you could copy and paste the data from every browse tool into an excel workbook and use their search function instead, but that's obviously a cumbersome and unhelpful process, particularly as the excel sheet will have to be remade with every run of the workflow.

You could also use sort tools throughout before a browse tool, but that is still slow and doesn't help with cases where "ABC Ltd" is matching to "The ABC Co ltd"

Perhaps it would be much easier to just have a small search box in every browse tool?

Or is there a feature that I'm not aware of that makes this process of quality checking your workflow easier already?