Alteryx Designer Ideas

I personally think it would work better to tab from 'Select Column' to 'Enter Expression Here' and not the 'Functions' List as probably people who are tabbing would immediately like to start typing the formula rather than going through functions, fields, etc.

When you use Create Points tool - you then almost always need to use a Select tool to rename that point.

Can we please add a single text field to the Create Points tool - which would then allow us to create and name a point in one step?

When writing an expression in a Formula tool, I love that you can just type an open bracket and suggestions pop up that allow you to auto-fill the rest of the variable name. What I find frustrating, however, is that once you type the open bracket, the highlighted field automatically moves to the one where your mouse is pointing, regardless of if you have moved your mouse or not. I think it makes more sense to always highlight the first field in the list and only take mouse position into account once it has actually moved.

It is hard to describe in just a picture as opposed to a video but essentially I had my mouse below where I was typing in the screenshot below then when I typed the open bracket, the 3rd field listed automatically got selected even though I never moved my mouse.

Cc: @Hollingsworth 

The following idea might not be as valuable as some of @SeanAdams posts, but it would save this user precious fractions of time.   When I leave the canvas with my mouse (point A) to go up to the pallet I select and drag the tool down to the canvas.  Sometimes I do right-click and go through the menus to add the next tool, but generally I go through that labor only when I'm inserting in-stream the tool.  So here is my idea:

Double-Click your NEXT tool and it "Alteryx-ly" appears on your canvas in proximity to the hi-lighted (last) tool.  Better yet, connect it!  Now I can move from the pallet to the configuration panel directly without having to move my mouse down to the canvas and then over to the configuration panel.

Hopefully, my friend @Hollingsworth will find this time-saving idea worthy of a star.  Speed demons like @NicoleJohnson and @BenMoss might not need this turbo boost, but at my age it is worth the ask.

Cheers,

Mark

When entering a number of column names in the RegEx parse mode - please can you allow either Enter or down-arrow to move down to the next cell (standard windows convention)?

Currently Enter just exists the edit mode; and down-arrow does nothing.

cc: @Hollingsworth 

When using the output data tool, it would save me and my cluttered organizational skills a lot of effort if the writing workflow was saved as part of the yxdb metadata. 

I've often had to search to find a workflow which created the yxdb. I tend to use naming conventions to help me,  but it would be easier if the file and or path was easily found. 

cheers,

 mark

Could we please change the Interactive Chart tool, to:

• recognize when upstream types have changed and reconfigure (in the case of numerical types marked as string)
• For line charts - sort the values in order of the X value

Sample Flow - derivation of challenge 201:

Issue 1:

- The first interactive chart on this flow has no sorting at all performed by the charting tool - this may be due to the fact that the X & Y axes are in string fields.   Generally line charts would attempt to sort both the axes and the values (where the values should order according to the X axis).   Please can you add a default sort anyway?

Issue 2:

- If you then change the data types on these fields to be numeric - the charting tool still does not sort them until you reconfigure the tool manually
- REquest: please can you get the tool to remember the data types, so that it can prompt you; or even better just reconfigure?

(image looks identical after retyping the fields)

Issue 3:

- When you do a manual reconfigure of the tool after changing the types - the axes are sorted, but the values are not - so you end up with a chart that crosses back and forth.   Generally line charts are ordered in the order of the X Axis for the values

- Request: Please sort values on the line chart automatically in order of the X value?

NOTE: Finally got the outcome needed by forcing the sort before the interactive chart tool

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.  

Hello Dev Gurus - 

The message tool is nice, but anything you want to learn about what is happening is problematic because the messages you are writing to try to understand your workflow are lost in a sea of other messages.  This is especially problematic when you are trying to understand what is happening within a macro and you enable 'show all macro messages' in the runtime options.  

That being said, what would really help is for messages created with the message tool to have a tag as a user created message.  Then, at message evaluation time, you get all errors / all conversion warnings / all warnings / all user defined messages.  In this way, when you write an iterative macro and are giving yourself the state of the data on a run by run basis, you can just goto a panel that shows you just your messages, and not the entire syslog which is like drinking out of a fire hose. 

Thank you for attending my ted talk regarding Message Tool Improvements.

Could you expose a link to the Keyboard Shortcuts (which is here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.4/HotKeys_Shortcuts.htm?Highlight=keyboard%20shortcuts) on the primary help menu (screenshot below)

This will allow people to get quicker in Alteryx by exposing these shortcuts to more users.

It can be daunting to find the tool that is currently being processed by the engine in workflows that contain hundreds of tools with many ins, outs, and branches. During runtime, I want to be shown the tool that is running on the canvas. This functionality should be in the form of a button or something to direct focus to that area. It should not be the default.

The Optimize tool is a very useful capability - and if we could improve the error messaging then it would be much more approachable for users to learn and make use of.

For example - the error message in the attached image - could we please update this to provide information about what went wrong, and how to fix it?

Many thanks

It would be helpful to differentiate between annotations that have been automatically generated, vs those that have been manually entered. This would help speed up "reading" workflows, and reduce any confusion that occurs when annotations have been manually amended - but might look like auto-annotations.

E.g. auto-annotations appear Grey, whilst manually edited annotations appearing Black? 

My friend @jdunkerley79 posted a terse idea:  https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/FieldName-constant-in-Generate-Rows-Tools-an...  it is inactive, but I want to extend his thoughts.

Rephrasing his idea as mine:  The tool defaults the expressions to use [RowCount].  If you should either "Update Existing Field" or change the "Create New Field" the default expressions MUST be updated manually.  Please update the expressions to make use of the new field.

Well, that doesn't always work!  Often it will.  But if you change the TYPE to date, it certainly won't.  In fact, I see many questions about joining from within a DATE  RANGE and the technique to build date rows from the range requires the use of DateTimeAdd().  Wouldn't it be nice (like your sample workflows) to modify the default expression based on the change of data type?  I think so.

If we were thinking easy.  Suppose you could have a RANGE function (dates or numerics) where you simply selected the from, to fields and gave the user the option to select the units.  Now the tool auto-configures itself to create all of the "days" between the from and to dates or "1.0" and it creates all unit values between the two numeric amounts.

These would be "Alteryx" worthy enhancements in my opinion.

Cheers,

Mark

I really like that I can scroll -- using my mouse -- between the tool groups in Alteryx. Can this UX be added to scroll through my workflows? I usually have a bunch open, and this functionality would be awesome to have there, too! 🙂

PS: Yes, I know I can do Ctrl+Tab...but mouse scrolling is more efficient.

Can we have an option to save a workflow in a prior version for backward compatibility? I think Tableau offers this functionality.

Example:

If I have 2019.4.8 and a colleague has 2019.1.x, I cannot share my workflows because my colleague will receive a notice that the workflow was built in a newer version. I want to be able to save my workflow in 2019.1.x and send to my colleague.

This is predicated on the workflow not containing any tools/features not present in the older version. In that case, give me a warning about the specific tools/features that are not backward compatible. Thank you.

The desginer autosave feature is fantastic when you need it. However, it's pretty annoying when you don't need it as it seems like it:

• Autosaves blank workflows
• Autosaves workflows that are saved and haven't had any changes made to them

Hopefully all of the above can be filtered out from Autosave: 

The only workflow from the screenshot above that I'd want Autosaved would be the Parse Directory workflow as this is the only one which I made changes to:

- New Workflow1 - Completely blank

- PureGym Log In - Saved and no changes made

- New Workflow2 - Completely blank (however, I had dragged a tool onto canvas and deleted it, so something had changed)

However, Alteryx brings up all of the workflows:

Hi Dev team,

As well as this much needed UI feature to scroll through workflows https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Scrolling-functionality-added-to-Workflow-sh...

Could you please change the order of workflow names in the 'Active Documents' button to be ordered in the same order as the workflow tabs and not alphabetically as it currently is?

When you have more than 5 workflows open (or less if they have long names) it's so tricky to quickly and easily cycle through them to find the ones you need. This is especially important when demoing, training and presenting to others!

Thanks,

Joe

While almost all interface tools allow for default values, the listbox / manually set values does not.  The idea would be for a property on each line that when displayed to the user would have one or any values checked upon entry.  The configuration might look like Name:Value:Default.  I.e.

Alabama:01:Yes

Alaska:02:No

Arkansas:03:No

I would use this to pre-populate the listbox with entries from a database that would essentially allow the user to edit his previous entry.  In this example, the user previously selected Alabama and the results were stored in a database.  When editing the record using an analytics app, I would want the user to see what he chose and the other options available.