Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Please bring back the following two features/characteristics of the Saleforce input tool:

1. Large text box for SOQL Where statements (previous versions enabled one to space out complex queries in an organized fashion, we typically filter on 3 to 8 variables)

 

2. Remember connection settings on machine (in previous versions, the tool remembered the username/pw/token, all you had to do was select the URL from a drop down - now you have to type in the URL, username, PW, and Token)

 

Thank you much,

Jeremy

There are some minor tools like Twitter Search (http://www.alteryx.com/resources/blending-social-media-data-without-it) and Grazitti's Facebook Page crawler...

 

But we need tools for accessing and blending more of the existing semi-structure social data,

 

• no YouTube connector to search between videos and track impressions yet...
  
• no LinkedIn connector to crawl public and full profiles (with permission) to do HR analytics yet...
• no Instagram connector yet, to crawl marketing data and do trends and competition search
• no Flickr connector to grab pictures to do Image search and recognition...

 

Top social media sites Updated February 1, 2017;

1 | Facebook 1,100,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors
2 | YouTube 1,000,000,000

3 | Twitter 310,000,000

4 | LinkedIn 255,000,000
5 | Pinterest 250,000,000

6 | Google Plus+  120,000,000

7 | Tumblr 110,000,000

8 | Instagram100,000,000
9 | Reddit 85,000,000

10 | VK 80,000,000

11 | Flickr 65,000,000

12 | Vine 42,000,000
13 | Meetup 40,000,000

14 | Ask.fm 37,000,000

15 | ClassMates 15,000,000

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

 

 

Currently when I open and run an app in designer mode im unable to access any other modules while it runs.  It would be nice to be able to work on other modules while an app runs without opening a debug.

Seeing how we use browse to tools to help build out modules, but they slow down the modules because they write out temp files, it would be awesome to have a "record count" option similar to the input tool. This would allow us to see the data as it's flowing through the module without slowing it down.  Adding a sample tool before every browse would be fairly cumbersome. 

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

Hi,

Some of this suggestion may not be feasible due to Azure pricing guidelines - I am basing the idea/model off of anecdotal evidence.

Currently Alteryx Designer is available on Azure as a BYOL model, and Alteryx Server is available with both BYOL and a per hour license model.

I think it would be incredibly helpful to come up with a tiered "per hour" license model for Alteryx Designer in the Cloud, that leveraged something along the lines of "data consumption" or "data load"  as a metric in order to offer up a price point that would allow for a more spread out "trial" period.

Something akin to "up to 8 hours/ 4 GB of data per month" at a free tier (obviously those numbers could change pretty easily).

In particular, my area has a lot of folks in IT who are anecdotally interested in leveraging Alteryx, but when we have been able to give them a trial license, they typically only find an hour or two over the course of a month to leverage it.  Rather than constantly having to seek new trials for these users, I'd like to be able to suggest that they leverage Azure at a relatively low/fixed cost.

My experience with new Alteryx users is that they typically encounter a "cliff" where they try to think about problems the "old" way.  Even though the old way is much slower, this resistance often limits their exposure to the tool until they solve a problem "the alteryx way" and realize how much easier things can be.  Having this available over the course of, say, 3 months, where a user who managed to find 15 minutes could log in, play with the tool, and log out, at a cost-effective price point, would help to expand the use of Alteryx further for our organization.

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.

We are working with an industry leading RPA platform, and they have a very helpful feature built in where the platform keeps track of the ROI from usage of the product.

 

It feels like this is a very useful capability to have within Alteryx - we can base this on some simple assumptions, and if we make this part of the heads-up monitoring capability for the platform we can then avoid (or answer) all those questions about justifying the cost of the Alteryx licensing.

As a MicroStrategy customer it would be nice if Alteryx would support output for either the .mstr file format or better direct creation and publication of the iCUBE, intelligent cube format on their server solution. This would be similar to the existing features of writing a twbx or  TDE file extract and publish to Tableau server.

Opposite if the Input connector could read from an intelligence cube on the MSTR iServer as datasource that would be great as well.

Below a link to their SOA webservices documentation to pull data into applications, perhaps an option.

Data as a Service

 

 

As there is a DateTimeFirstOfMonth() Formula function is there any reason why there is not or could not be a DateTimeFirstOfWeek() equivilant.

Thanks,
Joe

Hi All,

when we create formulae or filters in Alteryx, it would be great not just to
have the option to include fields (by their names) in the formulae but
also have the option to include specific values from the fields right from a drop-down menu.
 
E.g. if I have a field called ‘Region’ with 5 values like (Africa and Middle East;
Europe; etc.), filtering the database for these individual values of ‘Region’
would be simpler if I could just select the values themselves from a drop-down
list. I have now the ‘variables’ small tab in the formula configuration window but
every time I have to type the value after selecting ‘Region’== from the variables.
This is annoying with long field values - you have to be careful with pronunciation.

If a simple right click or a new tab in the configuration window would list me the values
of the field (e.g. only if a categorical variable - it can list the top 10 most frequent values),
it is simpler to write the formula.

Thank you,

Laszlo

I would like the ablity to view the processing order of tools within module prior to processing and if needed reprioratize which tool processes first/last.  It would also be great to have the ablity to disable a subset of tools within a module prior to processing.

I love the new 9.5 Filter tool interface.  Very simple to create filters!

A simple addition could be to add an "And" and "Or" button next to the wizard so we can build more complex filters with multiple conditions

Have you noticed that when you save a custom image to a macro it multiplies the file size? Below I will outline why I believe this happens and how it could potentially be fixed.

 

Hypothesis:

When a image is saved in the XML of a macro, it is saved in a single line of XML code that is generally quite long. I believe the problem this causes is that this very long image code extends the length of all other lines to this new max length. This increased line length seems to increase the file size and is multiplicative based on how many lines of XML that have been extended in the macro. For example, I added a 5KB image to a 7KB macro and saving the macro resulted in a 29KB file size. I have also experienced saving a 5KB image to a 300KB macro that yielded a 1.4MB macro. 

 

In the (very zoomed out) image below, you can see the single line that contains the image information for this simple macro.

 

 

 

Potential Solution:

Images are saved in the Image tool by splitting the image information into multiple lines. I suggest this same methodology be introduced to custom images loaded to macros. The image below shows the XML of the Image tool that has the same image as the macro stored.

 

 

 

I mentioned this in the Solutions Center at Inspire 2016, but I wanted to follow up here to make sure it wasn't lost in the mix. 

Dear Alteryx,

Alteryx 9 new Macro configuration module, is great
One thing that could be improved :

For Iterative macros, it's very frustrated to set a Maximum of Iterations manually :
when the number is too high it keeps going unnecessarily
when it's too low, we are missing iterations

Ideally this parameters should be calculated automatically by Alteryx
It would just implie to have the possibility to declare the numeric field that must be used for Iteration ... then Alteryx could calculate before launching the job, the Min/Max to set automatically the iteration band.

Is this idea stupid?

Thanks

Arno

Provide the ability to leverage data "Connectors" as an option in the "Dynamic Input" tool.

I found a great use for the visual Layout Tool which solved the formatting issues I was running into. Unfortunately it doesn't pass through additional columns from the source. This means that I am unable to use the batch rendering (the "group data into separate reports" functionality in the render tool). See images below.

 

Image 1: Layout keeps columns in output 🙂

 

 

 

Image 2: Visual Layout drops columns in output

 

 Cheers

I haven't seen this idea posted exactly this way...

Right now the browse results are only available while a workflow is open. It would be great if they could be saved until the next run, because sometimes I have to do things in stages, saving and closing a workflow, then continuing on it another time. I would love to have the browse results fromt the last run still be there until I re-run it.