Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The "Open Example" feature that has been implemented for many tools helps new users quickly learn how to exploit Alteryx.  I would like to see Alteryx make further investments in this area and in particular I would like to see enhanced and organized documentation for functions with more and better examples.  I would encourage Alteryx to engage its ACE community and the other advanced users who are active in the Community to contribute to this effort. 

When you have a complex workflow and you need to identify what happens to a specific field throughout a LONG workflow, it would be great to have the paths, connections, etc highlighted.  

If the field is modified in a tool (formula for instance), the tool gets highlighted in orange.  If it just passes through a tool, it is highlighted in green and a tool where it gets dropped is colored red.

This will help in identifying which tools modify a field of interest as well as identify tools which "deselect" a field and cause it drop out.   I spend a lot of time tweaking workflows developed by other analysts, so this will greatly speed up troubleshooting and assessment time. 

As far as I know, in the current version (Jan 2018) of Designer the presentation settings for the canvas are global and are set by the user in the Canvas settings tab of the User settings.  There appears to be no way to adjust canvas settings at the individual workflow level that would over-ride the global defaults.  (Please tell me if I am wrong).

I propose that the user defined global defaults be retained but that the workflow configuration window include a new tab where local settings can be set.  This tab should include a button that enables a user to reset all local settings to the global defaults. 

Dear Alteryx Team !

When running an app the actual Analytic App Progress window is not very informative and can not help to know where do we stand in the process.

In order to improve that issue, it would be very nice to give the hand to developers to let them choosing which message should be display in the progress window.

Minimal need :

• At each macro step : A view of which macro is actually running with their corresponding iteration counter

Optimal need :

• Allowing to completely design and name the messages to display at each macro steps and iterations (free text + iteration counter + time estimation ...)

Many thanks

Arno

I would like to suggest a Canvas Mode: Can you make a feature where it is possible to maximise/full screen the canvas only (so that it pops up in a separate window)? I work on two screens so it would be handy to have the tools and ribbons with the results preview on one screen and a pure canvas designer on the other. 

Kind regards,

NN

I would like to suggest adding in additional options to the Output tool for running VBA code after inserts finish.

Similar to how the "7 Post Create SQL Statement" works for "ODBC" or "Oracle" Connections, having this option for excel would be game changing.

Our current processes rely on us calling a .vbs script, or manually formatting our output.

My job of automation would be significantly easier if this was an option.

Getting deliverable ready in an easy to digest format is key.

This would be very useful for testing changes in complex workflows.

It would be nice to have the option to overlay multiple addresses to find  marketing opportunities within the heatmap. Currently I have to map the addresses elsewhere and click back and forth between tabs to see where they lay within the chosen variables.

Comment tools are not aligned when using the ctrl & shift & +/- keyboard shortcut. It would be great if they were.

As detailed in How-To-Create-an-Optional-Field-for-an-Analytic-App, when using the "Generate Field Map for Input Data Tool" option in the File Browse tool, you can easily specify a field as "optional" by adding "(Optional)" to the field name in the input template. However, when you do this, it no longer automatically matches field names in the selected file unless those field names also include "(Optional)" in the field name. It would be very helpful to the user experience if the tool matched the name of the field prior to the "(Optional)" text with the fields in the selected file.

For example, if you include the field "Address (Optional)" in the input template file, and you select a file which has a field named "Address," that field is not automatically selected as a matching field. The user must manually match that field. "Address (Optional)" should automatically match "Address" if it exists. But, of course, if it does not exist, it would not match and it would remain optional.

I'm curently creating  an app using interface tools to control multiple worklflows.  It would be nice if I didnt have to physically drag the interface tool to the recceiving node.  For example, right now I can click on the Left node of a join tool and it gives me the option to make connections to that tool or out of that tool wireless.  It would be nice if I could right click and have an option to select from a list of interface tool incoming connections.

I find that when I'm using Alteryx, I'm constantly renaming the tool connectors. Here's my logic, most of the time:

I have something like a Join and 3 browses.

1. I name the L join something like "L: on product/location join"
2. I then copy that descriptor, and past it in the Annotation field
3. I then copy that descriptor, select the wired connector, and paste that in the connection configuration

MY VISION:

Have a setting where I could select the following options:

• Automatically annotate based on tool rename
• Automatically rename incoming connector based on tool rename

THE GUTS/REQUEST:

If I rename a tool, and "Automatically annotate based on tool rename" is enacted, it will insert that renaming at the top of the annotation field. If there is already data in that field, it will be shifted down. If I rename a tool and "Automatically rename incoming connector..." is on, then the connection coming into it gets [name string]+' connection' put into its name field. I included a picture of the end game of my request.

Thanks for your ear!

As I'm sure many users do, we schedule our workflows to run during non-business hours -- overnight and over the weekend. Our primary datasource (input tool) is a remotely hosted database that our organization doesn't maintain (and hence cannot monitor the status of). If the database were to timeout or if our query were to overload it's resources, our scheduled Alteryx workflow would (attempt to) continue to run for an unknown amout of time. We would like the ability to cancel a scheduled workflow if it has been running for a certain amount of time in order to prevent this.

Please give the ability to use formulas when using the "Manually set values" option in the Drop down tool.

Screenshot below shows an example:

I'd like to see a tool that you can drop into a workflow and it will stop running at that tool and/or start running after that tool. I know about the cache dataset macro, but I think it could be simplified and incorporated into the standard set of tools.

When you press tab from from the Test Type combo jumps to the Ok box, think should go to Test Value text box

I recently began working with chained analytic applications.  One of the things that I wanted to do was to take the values selected by the end user at each stage of the app and pass them further down in the application.  I was able to do this by dumping the selected values to Alteryx databases and then using drop downs to pull the data into subsequent apps.  However, I was wondering if there would be a better way of accomplishing this.  One reason is that, with my approach, I wind up with several additional drop downs in my interface--which I really don't want.  If there's a way around this, I'd love to hear it.  Alternately, if Alteryx could potentially support doing something like this in the future, I think it would be really helpful.

When building workflows, it would be nice to have "Save Workflow" and "Run Workflow" added to the right click menu when in the canvas.

Add to Right Click menu:

Save Workflow

Run Workflow

There is a web hosted trial that anyone can have a hands on experiance with alteryx tutorials  without even downoading the tool.

That's awesome... http://goo.gl/dpSoe2

It may be a nice idea to;

1) either start seperate "Alteryx-kaggle" instances with data sets specific to each kaggle competition so that anyone want to try out may have a go with those well known examples thru the Alteryx site, 

2) Or even better have a partnership with kaggle so that anyone can just have it's own Alteryx trial per specific competition on the kaggle website...

I'm sure this will draw a lot of attention...

Rationale;

You'll immediately have a greater reach in Kaggle community, some data hobbiyists and cs, ie students and acedemics (which will eventually end up doing lot's of data blending when ther are going to be hired by top notch firms...