Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In a multi-person BI team; or where you have a multitude of different flows hitting similar data - it's easy to loose track of the right connections; the right data sets etc.

 

Could we please add to the Alteryx toolset, the ability to:

- Register a set of connections with readable names

- Register a set of data-sets which are community managed.

 

Connection Registration:

I frequently connect to 5 different datastores to bring together analytical results.   Because Alteryx remembers the connections once-used I don't have to keep on building these connections from scratch, but these don't have a human-readable name; and they cannot be shared among the team to make workflow creation easier.

Suggestion: 

• Create the ability in Alteryx Designer to set up a data-store connection, with a human-readable name (e.g. "Timesheet Server").   
• Allow me to share this connection list with my team
• Allow me to either do pass-through password (i.e. don't save a password in the connection); or embed a password but make sure it's masked & encrypted so that the receiver cannot use this to get the password for the DB
• For enterprise customers - it would be great if I can connect to the enterprise connection store and use known good connections that way too...

 

Known Good Data Sets:

The other part of this is the community effect once a large number of people in the company start to get data-savvy.    for e.g. One person has found a good way to query the actual timesheet data (username; project; hours) - and another person has found a good way to query the HR systems to get user demographic information (username; location; contracted working hours).   

• Can we add to the Alteryx server, in the same way as Tableau and IBM Cognos / Watson have done; to allow users to publish a data-set connector which is known to work.
• That way - if I want timesheet data - I just browse the known good data-sets through Alteryx designer, and if I have questions I can go back to the connector owner
• additionally - the central administration team can then identify the ones that are certified as "golden source" or "clean; valid; governed data", and which ones are in a state of "user supplied - use at own risk"

 

For enterprise customers - this would transform alteryx from a stand-alone tool where everyone is re-inventing the wheel every time - to a Data Platform where each additional piece of work done increases the net value of the full ecosystem in a virtuous cycle.   It would also MASSIVELY accelerate every workflow build.

 

Happy to talk through this live with the Alteryx team if that's appropriate and helpful.

 

Thank you

Sean

 

 

Some say to mato and some say to_mato, but how about:  to/mato?

 

While working with my new friend, @Cedric we ran across a field in his data that contained a '/' character.  We were building a macro where we updated the value of the field [AB/CD] with another field selected from the incoming data.  Our error message was something akin to:  Field AB was not found.

 

We worked around the issue, but what remained was the fact that certain characters are permitted in field names within some aspects of Alteryx and not in others.  I don't know if you're aware of this limitation.  

 

Cheers,

Mark

I came up with an idea while replying to @Deeksha. An interesting option to secure the data would be to encrypt the data sets and "license" it to

• specific users
• specific time spans or
• people with certain credentials

just like we do by encrypting the workflow...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a tool container is disabled, I'd like the lines that are going into it to be different from "enabled" lines. 

 

They could be grey or dotted for example.

 

When working on a workflow and disabling containers, I find that the lines entering disabled containers become confusing or cluttering. It would be much simpler to focus my attention efficiently if lines that remain enabled could be distinguished quickly.

I recently had an error in a module because an expected variable was not present coming into a formula tool.  My variable, "MONDAY" was not present and the formula MONDAY/3 failed.  The workaround was to union all days into the incoming data and things worked fine.  I would have liked to have an Excel formula like this instead:

 

IF ISERROR([Monday]/3) THEN 0 ELSE [Monday]/3 ENDIF

 

Thanks

Would love to have a 'common used' tab, rather than a favourties box (as that lags what I am currenty using).

 

Would be nice to have it look at my usage and create sort by frequency of use table. Could also be done with all users as well (some kind of opt-in telematary data?).

In the output window, numbers should always be displayed right aligned by default. Also the font should be fixed width type so an 8 and 1 both take equal width and we dont see numbers as below.

11111111

88888888

 

1. It instantly tells the user that its data type is numeric without having to check metadata.

2. Readability of the values is greatly increased.

Create a tool that allows user to create calculated fields for Tableau to output along with a .tde so they are available when openning the tde.  

 

There are several situations where precalculated materialized data will visualize inaccurately in Tableau and calcualted fields need to be used.

• 1:* measures - Fixed Lod expersions for selected measures
• Count Distinct
• Percentages and Ratios

 

When you perform an "insert after", you have to navigate directly to the tool.    Not the end of the world, but if I could search through this list, it would be much quicker to do this function.

 

Another way of achieving this is when you add a new tool to a canvas - if you drag it on top of an existing tool the designer could ask "do you want to add this after (taking over all connections) or before; or connect the regular old way....    That way, the existing search woudl work.

 

I’m sure this has happened to you.

You’re working on several workflows at a time and you’ve made some progress on one of them but not saved it yet. You then try open the same file again in error and somehow, as you’re trying to declarer by closing windows, you mistakenly close the workflow you’ve made all the changes to without saving, leaving the one open without all your changes.

I’d like a similar situation where for example, you get an error message if you try and open an excel workbook if it is already open on your desktop.

It would be nice to instead of scheduling a workflow at a certain time, just schedule workflows to run after the current workflow is done.  

 

So what it would be is instead of running workflow B at 6:00 AM every morning, you could run workflow B when workflow A finishes running so that you would know that if there was anything happening in workflow A that workflow B relied on, everything would finish in the correct order.  

It would be nice to have the option of reassigning the Tool ID's based on each tool's process order within the workflow.

Hi Alteryx,

 

Today, Alteryx is can connect to AWS Aurora DB, but it is only for MySQL.

How about AWS Aurora PostgreSQL ? Will it be included in the next release ?

 

Best Regrads,

Samuel

Sometimes I just want to see the tool names without the annotations. Currently the options are Hide, Show, Show with Tool Names, but there doesn't seem to be a way to just see Tool Names without annotations.

I am always checking for some view (browse tools) and editing other tools. When moving around to editing other tools, the view will disappear with other selection. If there are features when we can have multiple views (result) as a reference and compare them together.

I cannot seem to create a vertical or horizontal tab group of workflows. This feature used to exist in prior versions and I think it disappeared in 2018.3, the release with the revamped UI. Is it just me or is this feature gone? I do still see it in the current documentation.

I've had the need to Find & Replace inside of a formula that I've written.  Would it be possible to have that type of functionality inside of the expression builder?

 

Does anyone else think that it would be useful?

In-app screens, lot of space is wasted because components/tools can just be stacked one below the other.

 

It would great if we could also insert them horizontally.

 

Thanks !

 

Arno

 

Tags : screen, app, macro, layout, tools, UI

 

I really like the ability in 10.0 to turn on and off certain tool categories and specific tools within a category to keep your toolbar clean.

 

What would really take it to the next level is allowing users to manage them like bookmarks in a broswer - let me create new custom groups and add anything to them, or move tools among groups.

 

The favorites method lays the foundation for this, but is limited in that everthing is on one group.  Using the method I suggest, users could basically have groups of tools tailored to specific analytic tasks.