Alteryx Designer Ideas

I do a lot of work with SQL code in the PRE/POST SQL options and when I get an error, it usually returns the entire code and a little bit about what is wrong. These long strings are hard to read in the current tooltip format as if you hover over to see the entire error, the tooltip goes away after 5 seconds. So I am frantically reading through lines of error code 5 seconds at time. Can we make it so the tooltip just hangs out until I move my cursor off of it?

When writing a good amount of code, it is easy to get lost in a sea of parentheses.  Just when you think you're all done, you get an error that can force you to scour through your code to find the missing, extra, or misplaced parenthesis. 

A common feature today is to highlight a parenthesis when its partner is clicked on.  This instantly lets you know if you have the wrong number of them and where. 

I didn't think this was that important early on in Alteryx, at least for me.  Formulas were meant to be short and easily readable at a glance.  Now as I dig deeper, there's R, Python, SQL and other text-heavy inputs. 

I don't need a full-fledged text editor in Alteryx, but I would love some quality of life features like parentheses matching.

Add an option to the tree tool generate custom lists similar to the list box.  When building apps for teams to use and we need them to select from either a product or store hierarchy it would greatly simplify the process if the tree tool could generate a custom list of the lowest level of the hierarchy that we could feed into a sql pull in the dynamic input tool.  On top making the workflow cleaner, I think it would make the user interface a lot cleaner, instead of a giant lists of stores/departments etc. they could drill down to the relevant area much faster.

When training people on the use of action tools, something that I always have to hit on is that when you are telling the tool which piece of the XML that you are adjusting, it's sort of difficult to tell what you have selected, and super easy to accidentally select something else.

Example:

When you initially select the action to take it's this nice Blue Color. However, it still doesn't feel exactly like you have actually selected anything or told the Action Tool what to do, since it's so easy to just select any other one of these actions.

A slightly different problem is that if you are selecting an action that has been previously configured, it is just this light grey color. So it can be easy to accidentally change your settings because you may not realize it's actually set up.

Here is a recent community post that sort of outlines a few of these problems.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Analytic-App-to-Create-Custom-SQL-Quer...

I think I'm liking the new UI, but I think it's necessary to bring back save, undo and re-do buttons....

1. Frequent saving of workflows is crucial and not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts

2. The ability to undo (lots) of changes is a key part of iterating and rapidly building workflows in Alteryx and again not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts to do this.

Looks like there's potentially space to add this to the right of 'help' (I suspect this might be technically quiet difficult) or to the left of 'run', 'schedule' and 'active documents' as seen in the image below.

Out of interest, where has the 'documents' terminology come from?

Similar to previous ideas from @patrick_mcauliffe and @shailesh_patel - would like to request 2 things:

Default on Folder Picker Interface tool

The folder picker tool does not currently allow a default value - this unnecessarily adds work if users have the same value 90% of the time.

Please add a field for the default value that will show when the interface starts up

Similar ideas:

- Default on Date interface: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Default-Date-for-Interface-Tool/idi-p/35770

- Default on File Selector: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Default-file-location-in-file-broswer-Interf...

It is just a bit of annoyance, really. I'd like to see the option of inputting a hexcode of color and/or a screen color picker in the color dialog. At the moment, you have to change R, G, B separately or play around with the cursor to find the right color.

The color dialog is relevant for the documentation purposes but also reporting tools and I'm sure it would make life easier to some people, especially when branding colours are important.

Hi Alteryx,

Can you add the search functionality in the dropdown (Apps) where the user enters specific text and the dropdown list gets filtered accordingly?

It would enhance the user's experience while using large lists in dropdown.

This request is super simple!  I love how Alteryx displays the row count and size of the data passing through each tool at run time.  Can you set the default formatting for the row count indicators to be #,###?  Without the commas, it's hard to easily check the row count once you get more than 6-9 digits.

In the example below, it would be so much more readable if it displayed as 75,640,320.

It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).

See this picture which worth thousand words.

One thing I have noticed is that for some of the end-users of the apps I have in the gallery is that running the app from server is enough of a barrier that they don't use it at all. I have had to send links repeatedly to gallery, to apps on server for them to run them.

What I would love is a way to create a custom desktop icon (bear with me - I don't have the lexicon.) that an end-user would open and it would launch the app in the server directly (I'm assuming this would be opening a browser of choice, opening the app/workflow to the screen where it gives you the option to 'Run/Download/Schedule'  rather than accessing it through a shared collection in the Gallery through a browser.

Possible extensions of this are the ability to create an app for a mobile device where they can access an app/workflow on server directly to run it from a phone/ipad.

Type-Anywhere Tool Selection

I'd like to suggest a new feature to Alteryx where you can 'type anywhere' on the canvas to begin searching for a tool which you can then select with the Enter key and cycle through results with TAB.

This would be a simple quality of life improvement/addition but, I believe, a useful one. The interface and tool palettes for Alteryx are very easy to navigate and even if you get stuck you can use the global search box to help you find tools, as well as community posts and KB articles. Having the ability to search on the canvas just by typing I think could really improve user speed and efficiency when adding tools. 

My idea of how this would work functionally is that with no other tool clicked, i.e. you've clicked onto a blank bit of the canvas, a user could just start typing their search and a small box with 3-4 results would start to populate with tool suggestions. Again using TAB and Enter to cycle and select this box respectively. An example of how this could look is shown below after a user would have typed 'sel'.

Type-Anywhere Tool Selection Mockup

The box could be removed by clicking off the box, ESC, etc. 

In the case of no search results, it could prompt to search the global search box, transferring the typed search term to the said global search box.

Thanks for taking the time to read my idea. If you think this could be useful to you, please leave a vote/like and/or comment!

Sam 🙂

The ability to move around in the canvas, especially with larger workflows is phenomenal! You can move up and down with the scroll wheel, left and right by holding shift, and zoom in and out with control.

The results window is a different story. While zooming in and out might not be useful, shift + scroll to quickly and accurately slide through the results window would be amazing. Often when setting up the next tool, developers will reference the results window, and navigating to the correct field can be cumbersome, especially when the amount of fields quickly increase.

Apologize if this is already an idea, but I didn't see anything when searching through the ideas.

As well as using keyboard shortcuts, many of us are using a mouse / keyboard with program specific assignable shortcut buttons. It is a serious boost to productivity. The ability to instantly enable / disable would be a great tool large complex workflows. In general, it would be great to expand the keyboard shortcuts to offer more Alteryx specific advanced functions.

The drop down\list box have numerous ways to list values. One of them that I like is connecting to an external source. You simply have an external source file with a Name column and a Value column. It will display the data in the Name column and pass the data in the Value column. Now suppose instead of connecting to an external source I wanted to use connected tools. Currently, I would have to crosstab this data and the drop down\list box would display and pass the column names.

What if the drop down\list box could have an additional option added where you could connect tools and it would act identically as an external source (display the data in the Name column and pass the data in the Value column). This would be much easier and more functional!

I'd like to hold CTRL, click on a tool and drag it to somewhere else on the canvas to copy it. 

This is functionality common in other software (e.g. Tableau, MS Office). 

Currently I have to either:

right click > Copy, right click > Paste, or

Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V. 

Hi,

I would like to be able to modify my connection string in the Alias Manager.

Connection string is greyed out :

If I want to change my connection string, I have to create a new alias.

I always end up sorting after the Summarize tool. It would be nice to have an option to sort on a field in the Actions section of the Sort tool. 

Hello

Alteryx Desktop 2018.4 has a new interface which looks nice, but the labels and texts of its interface is difficult to read (as seen in the below screenshot).

It's seem that the interface's font type or size is not appropriate!

(Knowing that we didn't have any problem with the previous versions of Alteryx Desktop 11.7, 2018.2, & 2018.3)

So, I suggest to change the interface's font type or size of Alteryx Desktop 2018.4 as it was in the previous versions or to another font which is easy to read,

or at least having an option that allow the user to adjust the interface's font type and size.

My solution now is to downgrade to version 2018.3 where I have no problem at all regarding the interface's font.