Alteryx Designer Ideas

The crosstab tool replaces any non-alphanumeric characters with underscores in column names. It would be helpful to keep the original values as column names (or to have the option to toggle whether or not special characters are replaced with underscores).

This is often an issue for reporting and for dynamically-populated app inputs (e.g. drop-down), where we need to retain the special characters.

For example, say I have the following dataset: 

Currently, the crosstab tool produces this:

I would like this:

There are currently (somewhat cumbersome) workarounds such as adding an extra row with the original names, and then using Dynamic Rename to rename the columns, but it would be great to be able to use the data straight out of the crosstab!

With the 2019.3 release the summarize tool now includes prefixes for grouped fields. While a nice addition, in application it makes using this data downstream (like joining to other tables) more involved because of needing to remove this prefix. 

It would be nice to have this as an option (a checkbox to add/remove prefixes maybe) or just revert back to pre-2019.3 behavior...thanks!

Hi to all,

I have seen one or two posts requesting ability to total up rows and/or columns of numbers, however this idea also requests the ability to subtotal data by a field and also produce an overall total.

This could be an extension to existing tools such as 'Summarise' and 'Cross Tab' or could be a stand alone tool.  Desired output of using a tool like this would produce something like this:

This would be incredibly useful for building reports within Alteryx as well as analysing the data, and cut down the amount of tools currently required to produce this.  I have seen a third party tool which does some of this but this adds the ability to subtotal.

thanks - Roger

Currently the cross tab tool automatically sorts alphabetically by the "New Column Headers" field. Often times I have to output data with dates across the columns and therefore have to do a cross tab to achieve this. The problem is when I have the dates formatted with month names, the crosstab automatically sorts it in alphabetical order instead of date order (i.e. Apr, Aug, Dec, etc vs Jan, Feb, Mar). To get around this issue, I have to use a dynamic rename tool. It would be great if there was a way to choose the order of the crosstab (i.e. in the order of the data, crosstab, another field, etc.).

With the continued growth of Graph Databases, it would be nice for Alteryx to creates a new tool set that would allow input/output connectors for Graph Databases like Neo4j which software tools like Pentaho and Talend already have.

Keith. 

Hello Alteryx Devs - 

When I got to write some scripting in the formula tool, my data stream properties should be the first to be suggested once a user starts typing a letter, not the last. 

uppercase(Ad -> gives me:

DateTimeAdd

FileAddPaths

PadLeft

PadRight

ReadRegistryString

[Address]

I think we would need a dedicated R macro to ascertain the chances anyone in is going to need [ReadRegistryString] before they need a column of their own data that starts with [Ad...]

Easy fix.  Makes a big difference.  

Thanks.

I work with data where milliseconds is my saviour when I count distinct the datetime to get number of events. Alteryx ignores the millisecond part (as lots of other BI tool providers - I don't know what is going on with this idea that milliseconds are not needed). Yes I can convert it to string but it's not the best practice to create duplicate fields just so that I have date part for date-related calculation (plotting, time difference) and on the other hand string value for quick and easy counting..

I would love to see a "Product" option added to the summarize tool. I can currently count, sum, mean etc., but I can't multiply my data while grouping. There are numerous "work arounds", but a native product function built into the summarize tool would be great.

Thanks for listening!

When using the Summarize Tool please provide a grouping action that does a unique string concatenation. Example below. 

Input table

Typical Concatenation output grouping on 'Category'

Desired output with Unique String Concatenation

I realize that this can be done with two inline Summarize tools but getting this done in one tool will streamline a workflow.

Hi, I have searched through the community, and I wasn't able to find a duplicate for this idea. If in fact there is, I apologize and please point me to that post. I think that it would be a good idea to have date options in the summarize tool that would allow for grouping at higher levels of the date. I often have a date field that is specific to the day (i.e. 2018-01-01), and I just want to group by the year or month. Currently in order to do this, I have to create a formula before the summarize tool that formats the date according to how I want to group it, and then I am able to group off that field in the summarize tool. It would be nice if in the summarize tool, I could select the date field, and then have the option to group it at year, month, week, etc. 

These tools seem to be volatile, as in if you click on them before you run the workflow they lose their configuration. This is infuriating. Can we change this to be like every other tool where you can copy, paste or click into it at any time and it remembers its config.

Nick

Is there a way we can turn on and off any tools in the workflow. This way we can run the tool and when a certain tool is marked off it is not executed. This way we can test the workflow and check different output without deleting the tools existing on the workflow, we can just turn then on or off.

OK, this one will only save a single click per addition of a tool, but with Alteryx's general awesomeness small annoyances become like a stone in the shoe.

Consider my highly complex workflow below ; having inspected the dataset I now realise that I don't want some of the fields in my dataset...

...so I drag a Select tool in to deselect the columns, but I can't remember what the dataset looks like and I can't see the data...

...so I click on the Input tab and there it is, I can deselect away !

It would be particularly useful with something like a Summarize tool where I like to see the data to decide which aggregation to use.

Thanks !

While In-db tools are very helpful and cut down the time needed to write complex SQL , there are some steps that are faster by directly writing SQL like window functions- OVER (PARTITION BY .....). In Alteryx, we need to create multiple joins and summaries to perform a window function. It would be immensely helpful if there was a SQL editor tool for in-db workflows where we can edit the SQL code at any point in the workflow, or even better, if they can add an "edit" function to every in-db tool where we can customize the SQL code generated and then send to the next tool.

This will cut down the time immensely and streamline the workflow to make Alteryx a true contender for the ETL solution space.

When CrossTab is used, string data in fields is converted to field names.  If the data in the data field has a hyphen in it, this is automatically converted to an underscore when it becomes a field name. 

Hyphens are legal in field names, so can we make CrossTab tolerate the string as is without changing it?  If that is a breaking change, could a checkbox be added that allows users to get CrossTab to try to use the text as is and exception if the string is illegal as a field name?

Hyphens are required in the field name when using the Download tool, as some header names like "Content-Type" have hyphens in them.

The Summarize tool should have an option to ignore warnings like this:

Group Bys on Double or Float are not recommended due to rounding error.

A problem I'm currently trying to solve and feel like I'm spending way too much time on it..

I have a data set which has some data in it from multiple languages, and I only want English values.  I was able to get rid of the words with non English letters with a little regular expression and filtering.  However, there's some words that do contain all English letters but aren't English.  What I'm trying to do is bring in an English dictionary to compare words and see which rows have non English words according to the dictionary.  However, this is proving to be a bit harder than I thought.  I think I can do it, but it feels like this should be much simpler than it is.

It would be great to have a tool that would run a "spell check" on fields (almost all dictionaries for all languages are available free online).  This could also be useful also just for cleaning up open text types of data where people type stuff in quickly and don't re-read it! 🙂

It would be great if Alteryx could introduce a tool implementing a Decision Model Notation (DMN)-style Decision Table as an option to remove business logic from a workflow.

Arbitrary business rules are frequently implemented against datasets in Alteryx workflows before actual processing occurs. The implementation of complex business logic frequently results in a spider web of join, filter, formula, and union tools. 

It would be great if you could select multiple Data Fields in a single Crosstab

For example. I would like to SUM (Methodology) Pet Food Sales (Data Field 1) & Baby Food Sales (Data Field 2) By Store (Grouping Field) By Day of Week (Header field).