Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be useful to be able to select a single container (containing a data input) or multiple containers using Shift, and run those and only those.

When building a new element to a larger workflow, I often enter a new Input in a new container, the ability to run just that container without having to turn off all my other containers would be really useful in speeding up the start of joining things together.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks,

Doug 

Working in the accounting department, this has come up too many times now to ignore! 

Would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see a new formula available in the DateTime formula suite that mimics the function of the EOMONTH() formula when working with dates in Excel. 

The beauty of the EOMONTH() formula in Excel is that I can just give it a date, and then tell it how many months in the future or past I would like it to add/subtract... Alternatively, in Alteryx, this can require 2 or 3 nested DateTime functions to arrive at the same answer. 

Example: To find the end of the month 2 months in the future from today's date, I would use the following formula...

Excel = EOMONTH(Today(),2)

Alteryx = DateTimeAdd(DateTimeAdd(DateTimeTrim(DateTimeToday(),"month"),3,"months"),-1,"days")

Seems much more complicated than it needs to be in Alteryx, and easy to get lost in the nested formulas & non-intuitive adding/subtracting of months/days! I can see a new formula (something like DateTimeEOMonth?) being structured as follows in Alteryx: DateTimeEOMonth([Field],increment)

Please consider! Our accounting department thanks you heartily in advance... 🙂

Cheers,

NJ

We have 'CountDistinct' and 'Concatenate' options within Summarize tool. 

But 'Concatenate' displays all the instances of value for a Grouped field, this might include lot of duplicates.

It would be great to have an option like 'ConcatDistinct'.

For example - 

Group by 'Branch' and 'ConcatDistinct' Customer should result as Figure 1 instead of Figure 2 - 

Figure 1-

Figure 2-

While this is achievable in different ways currently with a set of tools, but it gets tedious when number of fields is large from which distinct values are to be captured. 

Thank you,

Rohan.

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 

Could we please have a Type field added to the "Select Fields to Cleanse" configuration window for the Data Cleansing Tool? This small feature would save a lot of time (saving the time needed to check the Metadata for every field every time I use the Data Cleansing Tool). Similar functionality to the way the Summarize Tool displays both Field and Type (just one additional field).

Today:

Future Version:

Pardon my sad photoshopping 🙂

Note: I realize the Data Cleansing is a macro and this functionality is not currently available with the "Check Box" interface tool.

Thank you!

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.

Often as I am scraping web sites, some clever developer has put an invisible character (ASCII or Unicode) in the data which causes terrible trouble.

I've identified 89 instances of zero-width or non-zero-width glyphs that are not visible and/or Alteryx does not classify as whitespace. There are probably more, but Unicode is big y'all.

Unfortunately, the Trim() string function only removes 4 of these characters (Tab, Newline, Carriage Feed, and Space).
REGEX_REPLACE with the \s option (which is what the Cleanse macro uses) is a little better but still only removes 20. And it removes all instances, not just leading and trailing.

I've attached a workflow which proves this issue.

@apolly: this is what I mentioned at GKO.

And I did see this post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Elegantly-remove-all-ASCII-characters-...), but it's too brute force. Especially as Alteryx is localized and more users need those Unicode characters.

The introduction fo a rank tool would be hugely beneficial. Whilst there are currently means to rank using a combination of other tools formula/running total/multirow etc... a specific "Rank Tool" would be provide a seemless and smoother way to rank your data either for further analysis or purely to output this field.

This tool should include a sort by and group by functionaility as well as options for ranking (such as dense ranking or unique ranking) and in addition multi levels of ranking (ie. Rank by "Field A" Then By "Field B" etc...).

Now that the formula tool has syntaxing and highlighting and autofilling, it would be great if it would color things differently depending on the datatype. Currently fields are blue and constants are green when I go to select them:

I think the constants can remain green, but then maybe have something like: strings = blue, numbers=red, dates=orange, blobs/spatials/bool/anything else=black (or any other colors that look good). Then the formula tool would also have similar colors. Currently my fields and constants both look purplish:

Instead, I think the colors should remain the same (ie. ALAE Reserve should be blue and the engine should be green) 

The default data type for new columns used to be Double, and now it is V_WString.  Is this user-configurable?  I find that, at least in my work, needing a formula to output a Double is way more common than a V_WString.  I'm curious of other community members' thoughts here.  If there isn't a consensus, it would be great to have this be a user-configurable default.

Currently zero-width spaces are not removed by the data cleanse tool. This means you can have two visually similar words like Dog and Dog but one is actually longer than the other due to zero width characters. The removal of these zero-width spaces can be added with the formula.

REGEX_Replace([_CurrentField_], "\x{200B}", "")

There's a common need to perform the same function on many fields, where you want to bring in data from a secondary field which is defined by the current column name.

So - for example:

Input:

• Prod1UnitWeight: 10
• Prod1Qty: 10
• Prod2UnitWeight:15
• Prod2Qty: 1

Output

• Prod1TotalWeight: 100
• Prod2TotalWeight: 15

So it would be useful to be able to have an indirect function where you can create a string which contains the field you want to use; and then indirect to it.

For example: 

• Multi-field formula on Prod1Qty; and ProdQty
• CreateNewField Prod1TotalWeight
• [_CurrentField_] + indirect(replace([_currentFieldName_],"Qty","UnitWeight")
• which would resolve to prod1Qty * indirect("Prod1UnitWeight")

I often find myself combining data from different sources. It is external data I have no control of. One of the main problems I face is that columns are often named differently: 'this is a comment' in table1 is called 'a comment this is' in table 2 and 'comment' in table3.

The union tool is convenient for tables with few columns only: when the columns are many, moving them left and right is confusing and time-consuming.

I currently list and associate the column names in Excel, then use this as the basis to rename columns in Alteryx with a select tool, then do a union in Alteryx.

It would be extremely convenient and efficient if Alteryx had some kind of drop-down box to do this association. I have tehse steps in mind:

1) Alteryx tries to guess associations by column names (if two columns have the same name in two tables, they are associated to each other)

2) for the ones with no associations, rather than scrolling left and right as is now the case with the union tool, the suer would be able to choose from a drop-down list. This would make it evident that 'this is a comment' matches 'a comment this is', etc

It would be really cool if we could drag an entire configured formula from one formula tool into another formula tool.

It would be great if there was an option to delete an expected column from a select tool. Sometimes I have to do a lot of work to rename different columns and would love to be able to copy & paste a select tool to partner with a slightly different input file. It would be great to delete an expected column, so I would not be forced to unselect the column to prevent error (I'd rather have the column treated as an *unknown) and I could use the remaining columns which are still applicable.