Alteryx Designer Ideas

Lots of use cases involve concatenating some values based on group by clauses within the Summarize tool.

It will be great to have the option to Concatenate Unique as an aggregation method, so the results will have just one appearance for each value in the results.

Plus, having the option to get the chance to have them sorted or not will be awesome.

A simple quality of life improvement that I would love, is the ability to rename the output of the transpose tool in its configuration, rather than only having 'Name' and 'Value' 

Would just let me drop the renaming of these fields afterwards :)

Hello --

Many times, I want to summarize data by grouping it, but to really reduce the number of rows, some data needs to be concatenated.

The problem is that some data that is group is repeated and concatenating the data will double, triple, or give a large field of concatenated data.

As an example:

Name                                         State

The above, if we concatenate by State would look like:

What I propose is a new option called Concatenate Unique so I would get:

This would prevent us from having to use a Regex formula to make the column unique.

Thanks,

Seth

Issue

Whenever a Summarize tool is used, it renames the output field (e.g., sales becomes SUM_sales or AVG_sales).  

Proposal

I think a reasonable compromise is to by default not rename fields in the Summarize Tool, but to include an option (in the tool, or in global settings) to allow for renaming.

Rationale

I have yet to come across a use case where automatic renaming of aggregated fields is desirable. What I have come across is the annoyance to rename the fields back to what they were with a Dynamic Rename tool, and sometimes having to do this multiple times (e.g., converting back a SUM_SUM_SUM_sales back to sales). Additionally, automatic field renaming causes workflow errors when workflows are later modified by adding/removing a Summarize tool (e.g., if you later add a Summarize tool, all downstream steps will expect the "sales" field and not know to use the "Sum_sales field). 

Automatic Renaming feels very much like historic Excel with Pivot Tables field renaming and not reflective of modern code-based workflow best practices.

I appreciate you considering this improvement.

When using the transpose and cross tab tools, I find that I frequently need to reorder the columns selected in the "Key Columns" and "Group data by these values" sections of the tools respectively by using a select tool. It would be helpful to provide users with the ability reorder fields displayed in these tools similar to the functionality provided in the select, join, append, summarize tools etc. Currently the tools default to outputting these columns in the order they come in through the incoming data stream. 

It would be ever so helpful and save a couple extra steps if a count distinct option could be added to the crosstab tool.  Seems like a slam dunk since plain ole 'count' is already a choice.

Hello,

It would be very helpful to have a search box for field names in the summary tool, I think it would help decrease errors by selecting fields by mistake with similar names and will help gain a couple of seconds while looking around for a specific field, particularly with datasets with a lots of them.

Like this:

Currently both the formula and summarise tools round to 6.d.p for finance calculations such as IRR. People coming from Excel will be used to a higher precision then this. It would be great to up the precision in line with other platforms to 8.d.p +

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!

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

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!

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..

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.).

Hello,

Today I worked with summarize tool and need to merge/concatenate 10 string columns of dataset with different separator than is set up by default (",")

Current status is that you can multiple select columns that you want to concatenate (that's good) but when you want to set up for all output columns different separator than default, you must set up it for each column, in my case it was 10 columns..

one field is selected (Concatenate option is available)

More fields selected (Concatenate option is hidden)

My idea

Allow to multiple selection of fields that are concatenated and allow to set up separator for these fields. Benefit will be that you can mass setup different separator for various fields

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.

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, it would be helpful to be able to have multiple levels of detail in a summarize tool. So, rather than aggregating on the lowest level of the group-bys, being able to select the level or partition for the aggregate. The current workaround for this is having multiple summarize tools and joining back to get all the data in one table.

The configuration would look something like this:

With the aggregation field maybe being a pick-list of available "group by" columns. It should default to all the group by columns, but you could un-select some if you wanted a higher level of detail.

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!

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.