Alteryx Designer Ideas

I often encounter situations where I need to apply the same formula to several columns. Doing this requires copy/pasting the formula several times  and then updating the variable names in the formula for each output column. I wish there was a built in "Current Output Column" variable so that I could build one formula and use that for each column. 

For example: 

The "Manage Data Connections" tool is fantastic to save credentials alongside the connection without having to worry when you save the workflow that you've embedded a password. 

Imagine if - there were a similar utility to handle credentials/environment variables. 

• I could create an entry, give it a description, a username, and an encrypted password stored in my options, then refer to that for configurations/values throughout my workflows. 
  • Tableau credentials in the publish to tableau macro
  • Sharepoint Credentials in the sharepoint list connector
• When my password changes I only have to change it in one place
• If I handoff the workflow to another user I don't have to worry about scanning the xml to make sure I'm not passing them my password
• When a user opens my workflow that doesn't have a corresponding entry in their credentials manager they would be prompted using my description to add it.
• Entries could be exported and shared as well (with passwords scrubbed)

Example Entry Tableau:

Then when configuring a tool you could put in something like [Tableau Prod].[Password] and it would read in the value.

Or maybe for Sharepoint:

Or perhaps for a team file location:

Any of these values could be referenced in tool configurations, formulas, macro inputs by specifying the Alias and field.

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?

I just downloaded Alteryx Designer 2019.2 yesterday and got busy straight away but couldn't help notice that while I like the general look and feel of the tool and general design language, I'm concerned that configuring the tools I work with will require so much scrolling.

Could we add the ability to set the zoom level of the configuration pane like we do in the workflow window or have some form of control on how the config pane sizing of contents.

I have attached the config panes using the crosstab tool as an example with 2018.4 on the left and the new 2019.2 on the right. I took care to snapshot both versions the same dimension for a more apples to apples comparison.

Now that 2019.2 is officially released I'll raise this here as I know it was raised as part of the beta testing. With the new interactive browse tool when filtering results the record numbering restarts.

For example in this window from a weekly challenge, I originally have this:

Then when I filter on the Allocated column for records where the Allocated amount is 0, I get this:

And as you can see the Record on the left hand side is numbered 1 - 15, so when trying to locate one of these lines to check the formula is working as expected it makes it difficult to isolate, where as if I knew that filtered record 10 was actually record 394 in the data I can then scroll to that point.  

I know a solution to this would be to add a record ID field to the data, but this is not always needed.

Every time we create a file output - you first have to check if the folder exists - and if not then create it.

Currently it's quite onerous to do a directory create - especially with all the error trapping to make this production safe - and everyone is reinventing the wheel in their own companies.

Given the commonality of this need - could we add a tool that allows you to check for existance of a directory and attempt to create it (with nested directories and useful status / error descriptions to act upon)

Love the new updates to the Browse tool in 2019.2! However, if you choose the option Open results in new window, which I do often so I can see my whole dataset, the search/filter/sort functionality goes away. Would be great if that new functionality also worked in the new window. Thanks!

Can't wait for the new base maps!

I hope that there will be a radio button or a check box where Auto Save on Run can be disabled.  Auto Save on Run is a bad idea.  I often go into workflows and only need one report - so I break a bunch of connections to other reports, maybe I make some other small adhoc or one-off type changes and then Run the workflow.  I get my one, maybe modified, report and close without saving.  So the next time I open the workflow it's as it should be. 

With Auto Save on Run - I'd have to undo everything I changed.  What if it's not my workflow to be changing?  If there is no option to turn it off:  I'd have to make a copy of the workflow, open and make changes, then run, then close, then delete the workflow.

In general, you should never be saving unless it is a deliberate act performed by the user.

Sometimes formulas get pretty long. There are cases of deeply nested conditionals, concatenation of long strings, cases where multiple casts and parses are used, etc. where formulas get pretty large and unwieldy. The current system of wrapping lines and managing the size of the properties pane can be a hassle, especially if you are trying to use any sort of whitespace formatting to make the formulas more readable.

My solution is this is pretty simple, add a pop-out window for formulas. It could be a context menu option from right-clicking the formula box itself, a button on the bar at the top of each formula, or any number of other things.

A really good example of this is MS Access. You can right-click any text box that takes an expression and open it in the expression editor pop-up window. The current system is more like excel where you're stuck with whatever box size you're given.

Using other data viz tools like Tableau, we often plot yearly timeseries of data onto the same line chart so we can quickly compare year-on-year differences.  All data viz tools seem to have complexities but the logical approach is the same.  What you do is map all the years data to a relative year, i.e. this year, and then give each year it's own title.  See the example below snipped from a Tableau dashboard:

In this example 7 years of data have been plotted on the same chart.  Note the x-axis,  In Tableau we are able to format the X-Axis labels to only show month and day (Mon-D).  This removes the common relative year, i.e 2019.

As expected, Alteryx is awesome at preparing data to do this kind of thing.  Using the interactive charting tool you can build really nice charts.  However there is currently no way to format the X-Axis label, you must show the relative year too, as shown in the picture below (snipped from the browse tool, outputted from the interactive chart tool):

It was really easy to prepare the 5 year min, max and average lines, which is almost impossible to do in Tableau!

My idea in a nutshell is, please change the interactive chart tool so that the labels on the axis can be formatted to the user's choice, i.e. in this case formatted from datetime to "%B-%d".

Please note, the workflow i'm building in this case, is creating 3 line charts of related data, each by year.  The end product is a daily email sent to users.

Thanks, nick 

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.

When opening an App in Designer - you are generally opening it to work on.  It should not open as an App but rather it should open as a Workflow.  Maybe make it so if you hold down the Ctrl or Shift key and opens the App - it opens as an App and you can test it out.

As a developer I want to Cache & Run all/selected inputs in a Workflow with one command. Maybe even with a keyboard shortcut?

Please add a toggle for Dark Mode as Alteryx, after all these years of using it, is burning out my retinas. 

The OS and most apps have a Dark Mode theme so flipping back to a bright white canvas is very jarring.  I tried to adjust the canvas colors in a more muted way but never can get it to work satisfactorily and still be as easy to read as the retina burning default.  

Hi All,

Was very happy to see the Bulk Loader introduced for Snowflake during last release. This bulk loader is specifically available for Snowflake environments that are hosted on AWS, but does not provide functionality for those environments using Azure. As Snowflake continues to build momentum, I imagine this will be a common request. Is there something in the pipeline to add this functionality?

For an interim solution, we will be working toward developing some generic scripts/snowsql to mimic that bulk load, but ultimately we'd love to have this as part of the tool.

Best,

devKev

Please add measures of statistical central tendency to the Summarize tool, such as:

Mid-range

Midhinge

Quartile

Thank you.

I know that incoming and outgoing connections can be wired and wireless, and that they will highlight when one clicks on a tool. However, it would be very useful to be able to highlight a particular connector in a particular colour (selected from a palette, perhaps, from the drop down window, or from the configuration). This would be especially useful when there are many connectors originating from a single tool.

Thanks

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

Cheers,

Mark

When documentin alteryx screen I sometimes hit printscreen and need to paste important matters to Comment tool...

But there is no paste from clipboard 😞

I suggest adding a minor icon that enables not only reading from png but pasting a screen or other image copied directly from memory...

For I need the following setting so I printscreen and capture as is;

Then put that into a PNG or JPG file using paint. And then prepare a comment box with that image in the background...