Alteryx Designer Ideas

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

Cross tab automatically alphabetizes the column headers this can be a little awkward when unioning on column position later on. Would be nice to have this as an optional feature through a tick box on the tool.

Adding a up and down arrow on each column would make it easier and quicker to sort columns then the drop down menu or sort tool

We waste a lot of time to search a field to join it in join or to deselect it select or to summarize in summarize. This mainly happens when we have long list of fields.

As search bar to find the field on top of any of these tools will be really helpful. 

Specially, for join tool if we can type the field name while joining would really help. 

Thank you,

Sanju

Often I need to add filters or other tools early on after the workflow is already been mostly built. If a tool connects to one tool I can drag the filter over the connecting line and add the filter seamlessly. However in large workflows there is often this situation:    

The Filter will only connect to one of the lines I'm hovering over. If I could connect to all lines simultaneously and drop in the connection to achieve this (would be awesome):

When building out Alteryx workflows there may be a need to read in different ranges within the same Excel spreadsheet. For example bringing in a table from Sheet1, but also isolating a table name in a particular cell (in my example cell C8).

When turning this into an analytic app, with a file browse is to add an action tool with the default value of "Update Input Data Tool".

However when specifying this option within the analytic app interface, you are only allowed to chose one option of the following:

i) Select a sheet

ii) Select a sheet and specify a range

iii) a named range or

iv) a list of sheet names.

The problem is in the example above I need a sheet and a range, but I want to avoid adding two file browse interface tools as it shouldn't be needed. If the user selects (i) then it loses the reference to cell C8, but I would imagine a lot of users as they get started with apps don't realise this is what will happen.

There is however a way to solve this currently and it requires overwriting the default behaviour and configuring the second action tool (the one that updates the file for C8), to update value with a formula, where you assume the user would select sheet name and then use this formula:

replace([#1],"$`","$C8:C8`")

However I would argue that this has a lot of technical debt, plus if the user needs to modify where the header is, for example to D8 they need to change the input file and the action tool so it works as a workflow and an analytic app.

Solution

Like how the configuration options for the input file, such as which row to input data from or whether first row contains data is maintained, modify the behaviour of the default option in the action tool to maintain references to ranges.

Please consider adding a new setting to the Render Tool, so the users can select or deselect if an existing File should be overwritten (Otherwise throw an error, like the Output Data Tool does, when configured to create a new Sheet and that Sheet already exists)

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.

It would be helpful if we could open 2 or more workflows at the same time from a gallery connection. Sometimes they are related or part of an overall update process, so opening all of them at the same time would save many clicks and a lot of time. 

The order of the join fields effects the ordering output

For more complex joins it would be nice to have up and down arrows much like the summarise tool:

I'm testing out the new Data Connection Manager (DCM) and think it needs 1 enhancement based on the way we'd use DCM. Whenever Alteryx opens, it should sync the Data Sources/Credentials from the Server. This is critically important when sharing these with more than 1 user when a password needs updated.

For example, DesignerA updates the password in the source system, and then updates the password in their Designer DCM settings. In order for this new password to get synced to DesignerB, 2 things have to manually happen: DesignerA would need to sync the new password to the server, and then DesignerB would need to sync the new password from the server. I can live with the first part where DesignerA needs to sync to the server. It's just part of the password update process. The second step though seems perilous. DesignerB should get the new password without having to do anything; as things currently stand, DesignerB will have the old password until they manually intervene and sync the password. Imagine a scenario where it's just DesignerB, but hundreds of people who would all have to sync their credentials. 

I also think this idea makes sense in light of the way Data Connections currently work (pre 21.4) where a similar sync happens automatically every time alteryx opens.  

It would be oh so nice to be able to copy a container's properties and paste those formatting options onto other containers.  It could be accomplished through a Paint Brush icon on CTRL-Copy and Right Click to paste format.  either way it would save setting the Color (multi-step select), Margin, transparency.

Cheers,

Mark

There is duplicated action in the table tool to force the user decide the decimal places.

In the normal situation, all the data preparation process has been completed prior to the Table tool, we just want to leverage on this tool to format the header or incorporate conditional formatting. However, once the Table tool is connected and we have to re-configure the decimal places for all the numeric columns, the column names will be varied from year to year and it brings additional manual intervention to the workflow.

We recommend to provide flexibility for us to take the original upstream data source without changing the underlying data set.

Lack of tools in Alteryx to extract data from True PDF. The current set of tools (Computer Vision) only allow us to extract data from images which is not ideal for True PDF documents in terms of accuracy.

Now : when you double click on the part of a field name text field (Formula, Filter, etc.) it selects only the word you double clicked.

Idea : It would be easier if a double click would select the entire field name with brackets for copy-pasting as an example.

I recently began using the SharePoint Files v2.0.1 tools to read and write data. The SharePoint Files Output tool allows you to take a sheet or filename from a column but that column is still included in the output. The standard Output Data tool has a "Keep Field in Output" checkbox that allows you to control if the column stays in the XLSX of CSV file. It would be great if this same functionality could be included in the SharePoint Files Output tool.

It would be nice to have a seed input for the Random % Sample tool. The edited picture above is what it might look like. One input is the seed value, and another input is the data. 

Due to different file formats whether it is .xlsb or any other formats, sometimes it requires end user to install additional drivers/engine.

Some of these driver installations require installations of outdated software e.g. Microsoft Access 2013 (Microsoft Access Database Engine 2013), which poses unnecessary security risk.

Therefore we recommend that in the future version should take note and incorporate such drivers into the installation package so that there is no need to install them separately.

I know it sounds trivial, but I hate having to do the extra click to get the browse tool to pop out.  Just upgraded from 2020.2 to 2021.3.  Before, you could pop out a browse window in 2 clicks:

Now you need 3 clicks:

Like I said, I know it sounds trivial, but when you do this dozens of times a day, it adds up to a big annoyance. 

Anyway, was just wondering if enough others felt the same and if so, hopefully the browser behavior could be pushed back to a 2 click pop out.  

Although I must say that I just LOVE the comma inserter.