Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would be great to have a find and replace option in the workflow.  I've deployed a template workflow to maintain a datamart.  I have about 50 sources which means about 50 workflows all very similar to each other.  In fact its typically only table names that change.  Would be cool to be able to open the template workflow and just do a find and replace on the name of the table.  The find and replace could prompt me on each replace or I could do a replace all.  This would be consistent with other apps like Excel.

Make it easier to use Delete and connect around 

ex: Shift + Delete

Connecting tools that are far apart in a big workflow is challenging.

 

My suggestion:

 

When you right click on the tool you want to connect FROM one of the menu choices would be "Connect From" which you would select. If the tool has multiple outputs (like a join for example) there would be a sub-menu with list of outputs.)

 

Then you would navigate to the tool you want to connect to  (I use the overview window all the time) and right click on the tool you want to connect TO and there would be a menu choice "Connect To". Again - if there are multiple inputs then there would be a sub-menu.

 

I'd expect Alteryx to remember the tool you connected from, so if you wanted to connect to multiple tools (say from an input file) you could just go to the next tool and right click and "Connect To" would be available.

 

Cheers,

Bob

 

 

 

 

 

In a future release, I'd love to see the whole concept of browsing for and installing new macros/apps brought into Designer itself.  It's always great finding new macros, but the expereince is inconsistent- sometimes you have to run an installer file, sometimes run a package, sometimes just put the file in a directory and add a 'watched macro' directory to your preferences.

 

I'd like to see a cleaner expereince where you can choose to 'Add Tools', browse the gallery, check the thing i want, and click the tools group I want to put it under, then have Alteryx take care of the rest.  There would also be the need for a 'Manage tools' screen where could could uncheck and remove them later if you no longer need them.

 

For inspiration, check out the way MS handles 'Adding Apps' via their catalog to build out your Sharepoint 2013+ site

An Alteryx workflow can have a lot of text in it. You can rename individual tools, add annotations to them and use comment boxes to write explanations of what the workflow is doing. The idea I would like to advocate is to have a search function built into Alteryx to find words within any of these text inputs.

 

Thank you,

 

James

Wouldn't it be nice to have more training examples available on YouTube?

Scenario:  6 input tools, and want to add, say, a select tool after each one.
Would be nice to select all 6, and add the tool after all of them at once.

Would be great if when copying and pasting tools onto the canvas they would appear next to the cursor, instead of near where they are being copied from. On large workflows it's annoying to copy the tool/s, paste, then drag to their new location.

It would be cool if a connector line would turn red when you select it, making it easier to trace the path (similar to how the lines turn red when you click on a join tool).

Comment boxes should not have to be 'configured' like other tools.  After dropping a box on the canvas the user should automatically be able to begin typing to complete the box.  All modifications of text should be accomplished via a selection directly from the canvas and a right click to bring up an edit box or function similar to MS solutions.

In one of the recent releases, Alteryx enhanced the error message when there is an error within the Formula tool to display the error and the formula expression number.  

 

Example: 

Error: Formula (3): Parse Error at char(0): Unknown variable "TEST" (Expression #2)

 

My suggestion would be to label the different expressions within the formula tool with expression numbers.   And/or code the expression name when there is an error message.

Using Ctrl + F in Alteryx is a quick and easy way to find various things in a module including tools and keywords. One drawback to this feature is that, after you type Ctrl + F, the cursor does not automatically go to the Find Text: text box in the window that appears. Many times I have typed Ctrl + F followed directly by my search word, as I am accustomed to doing in many other applications such as Adobe, Word, Excel, Google Chrome, etc., but Alteryx does nothing. This minor inconvenience slightly decreases the efficiency at which I am able to navigate Alteryx modules, and would be a great enhancement for the future.

When developing modules and looking to refactor/improve areas where tools should be placed into a macro (for re-use, or for module cleanliness), it would be nice if I could simply select all the tools that should be in the macro, right click, and have an option to "Create as Macro". The option would create a new module/macro, copy the tools to the canvas, and create the necessary macro inputs and outputs automatically. Additionally, the original module could be updated to replace the selected tools with the newly created macro.

It would be great to have a way to find a column by its name.

This feature would be particularly useful when exploring with data sets having a large number of fields.

This feature would be useful within several tool, in particular with the "Browse" tool and with the "Input" tool.

Ideally the user should be able to  "Ctrl-F" and jump to the column matching the name being typed.

Alternatively, the user could be able to sort the columns alphabetically.

 

Thank you for considering this feature suggestion.

 

Davide Gerbaudo

 

P.S. I understand from this discussion that such feature is not currently available.

I version all of my Alteryx work professionally and personally using git. Positions seem to be stored as floating points in XML and this can lead to unwanted behaviours in git. Containers can float around the canvas over time across many commits. There is also plenty of noise while diffing workflows. The noise is all of the "changes" in tool and container positions actually resulting from floating points. Is it possible to store positions in XML without floating points?

For many of us who use Alteryx to transform sensitive data, the Gallery is only a potential liability.  While Alteryx was able to disable the Gallery for us through a custom solution, it seems like users/account admins should be able to draw a hard line more easily and confirm Alteryx is only enabled to work on prem. 

I would like to see the Publish to Tableau Server tool updated to allow appending an extract with Encryption at Rest enabled.  As data security requirements become more stringent, this would be a beneficial option.  Right now, I'm only able to create or overwrite an extract if I've turned on server-wide encryption at rest enforcement in Tableau Server.

Pulling data down from Salesforce takes a looong time. It would be a great feature to be able to cache this, similar to how 9.5 added database caching.

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.