Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

 

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?

 

 

Sometime I use the save button within the browse tool to save a copy of the data. This does not work if you wish to overwrite an existing file though.

 

For example if I have a Tableau extract called mydata.tde and then using the browse tool I save the data and try to overwrite this file I am asked if I want to replace this file and on choosing 'Yes' Alteryx tries to save the data but then shows me an error about 'duplicate table name'. It should simply replace the file with the new data.

 

It is disorienting when I am creating string fields explicitly coded to a specific length, then viewing my results window and having the values not line up across rows. If a font like courier were added as an option, this could be avoided.

 

Example:

 

I think there should be a tool that can take two proportions from the same row (so four columns: numerator population 1, denom population 1, numerator population 2, denom population 2) and return the z-score between the two groups, with a check box to select the desired confidence level.

 

We monitor quarter-over-quarter changes in satisfaction diagnostics for some of our surveys, and we report the change in Top 2 box % (answers of very satisfied or somewhat satisfied); and we typically only investigate the changes that are statistically significant at a 95% confidence interval.

 

I have to write about 8 different formulas within the formula tool to get me the z-scores between the groups I'm investigating. A z-score tool would greatly reduce my workload!

With more people moving into urban developments, it would be helpful to allow analysts to measure customers within a "walking distance". Similar to drive time analysis, a step up would be to incorporate "walk time" analysis.

Hi,

This feature isn't a must - but would definitely be a nice to have.

Similar to the excel having a tab with key figures like average, count and sum 

It would be a really good idea to do something similar within Alteryx just to have a quick glance on key figures/functions (example attached - apologise for the bad paint job but definitely would look good with Alteryx colour scheme)


Thanks

Right now there is not an exception join in DB which means if I want to remove records I have to filter on NULL and with large tables this is really inefficient.

I will sometimes open "New Window(s)" from a single or multiple Browse(s), and arrange them on a second monitor to dig through a module I am unfamiliar with, or when building out complicated models.  It would be helpful if I could label these tempary new windows so that I don't spend to much time trying to remember which one is which.

Hi alteryx can you please create a poll or an forms to fill or approval processes kind of tools . I know we have some analytics app tools but can we create something like google forms where we can easily create forms and get data outputs. Emails notifications for those forms and approvals .. etc ..

As my Alteryx workflows are becoming more complex and involve integrating and conforming more and more data sources it is becoming increasingly important to be able to communicate what the output fields mean and how they were created (ie transformation rules) as output for end user consumption; particular the file target state output. 

 

It would be great if Alteryx could do the following: 

1. Produce a simple data dictionary from the Select tool and the Output tool. The Select tool more or less contains everything that is important to the business user; It would be awesome to know of way to export this along with the actual data produced by the output tool (hopefully this is something I've overlooked and is already offered).

Examples:

• using Excel would be to produce the output data set in one sheet and the data dictionary for all of its attributes in the second sheet.
• For an odbc output you could load the data set to the database and have the option to either create a data dictionary as a database table or csv file (you'd also want to offer the ability to append that data to the existing dictionary file or table. 

 

2. This one is more complex; but would be awesome. If the workflow used could be exported into a spreadsheet Source to Target (S2T) format along with supporting metadata / data dictionary for every step of the ETL process. This is necessary when I need to communicate my ETL processes to someone that cannot afford to purchase an alteryx licence but are required to review and approved the ETL process that I have built. I'd be happy to provide examples of how someone would likely want to see that formatted. 

My proposal is to create a new support at Alteryx team level according to provided picture with Alteryx toolbox logo for example in the same philosophy

Hi there,

 

I noticed that here: https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataRobotAutomodelTool.htm it is mentioned that the number of workers can be set, and that the default is 2. However, this option seems to be removed, and the default seems to be max.

In v10, I am using the summarize tool a lot and getting tired of selecting one or more fields and doing a sum function and having to revisit each summary tool when you add a numeric field upstream... I was hoping there would be a more dynamic method, e.g. select all numeric fields and then doing a SUM on _currentfield_.

Then I remembered the Field Info tool. (on a side note, I'd bet this tool is overlooked a lot). This tool is great because for each numeric field you get Min, Max, Median, Std Dev, Percent Missing, Unique Values, Mean, etc.

The one thing that's missing is SUM. Can you add it?

 

Also, can you give the user option to turn off layouts and reports so it runs faster? I only care out the data side.

 

or is there another way to do sum on dynamically selected numeric fields? (include Sum on Unknown field)

It would be great to have a spatial function that could be used to evaluate whether two spatial objects are equal/identical. I see this being available in at least three places:

 

1. An "ST_Equal" Formula function
2. A SpatialMatch "Where Target Equals Universe"
3. An "Equals" Action in the Spatial Process tool

It appears that the Marketo Input tool only is focused aroudn getting Lead oriented Objects, however since Marketo is a Marketing Automation tool, it has many more objects such as email performance, landing page performance, web activity, program performance, revenue explorer, etc. 

I'd like to vote up this idea of having marketo input connector having access to extrac data from other objects outside leads. 

Here is the latest Marketo Analytics resources that are available.  Anybody else encounter this bottleneck when trying to source the data out of Alteryx? 

Can you add the Data Output along with the Report Output on the Association Analysis tool.  

We needed to manually change this on our end but it would be nice if in 9.5 this easy upgrade was done already...

I have a column called Recency that only has values from 1 to 5. When I view the data using the Browse tool I see a scatter graph of the data that tells me very little apart from the fact that they only have values from 1 to 5. It would be much more useful to display a histogram showing how many records have 1,2 etc so I get a better idea of the data quality.