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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Featured Ideas

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.  

 

  • User Experience Design

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.

 

joe_lipski_1-1589790965393.png

 

 

When moving a tool container, all of the tools within it become mis-aligned with the canvas grid.  Moving any single tool immediately re-aligns it to the grid, which puts it out of alignment with the rest of the tools in the container.

 

Example:  Put 3 tools in a row in a tool container, all aligned horizontally.  Next, move the container.  Now, move the middle tool, then try to place it back in alignment with the other two.  You won't be able to, because they are out of alignment with the canvas grid.

 

Please fix this.  

all too often, we build an alteryx flow just to realise that step 8 out of 10 was wrong -so back to the beginning and rerun the entire thing.   this often is tedious if your work requires a big data set.

 

So there is a workaround, using the Cache Macro which can be downloaded (but this does require quite a bit of fiddling with containers; disabling items; setting flags; etc) - but it would be good to allow the user to "restart from here" like you can with a powerpoint slide deck.    I appreciate that this may be tricky since Alteryx may be flushing data out of memory as it goes along, so it cannot restart from any arbitrary point - but if we put the workflow into a "testing cached mode" to cache data at each step; or allowed users to set particular controls as a breakpoint and cache at these points, that would help immensely.

 

Thank you

Sean

 

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

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 working in a large workflow wireless connections help to make it easier to work with. However sometimes you want to be able to see all your connections (when debugging). 

 

I'd like to see a toggle (button on the toolbar) which would display all the connections including wireless. Ideally the wireless connections would be a different color. You could then click the button again to make the the wireless connections invisible.

 

Reason:

The existing options to display are limited as you have to click on individual tools to see the connections. 

 

The canvas has 3 options as demonstrated by exhibit A:

Capture.PNG

 

The user settings can change 2 of the 3 defaults as demonstrated in exhibit B. The layout default and connection settings progress can both be defaulted for all new workflows:

Capture2.PNG

 

Thus, I would propose that a user setting be added to the annotation box so that I can set the default to hide.

 

Mic DropMic Drop

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.

 

idea.gif

  • User Experience Design

Hi,

 

This is a small thing but it really messes with my OCD. It would be great if we could manually move the connection lines between tools , this would make large workflows a lot nicer to look at and easier to follow. 

 

I am aware of the wireless tool but i like to see connections, just want them a bit neater.

 

Thanks

  • User Experience Design

 Hi Alteryx Devs - 

 

Doing a simple, but cumbersome workflow with a lot of database inputs.  It was going slow, and every time I tried to paste something into it from another workflow, I'd get lock ups. Get the 'Workflow must be run for field meta info to be accurate' error. Google tells me that I need to check the 'Disable Auto Configuration' option.  OK.  It is in user settings, but this means for my other workflows that don't have problems like this (i.e., 99% of my workflows), I'll have that functionality applied when it really is only a problem for the minority. 

 

Should be a relatively simple fix to give this option at workflow properties time instead of user settings time. 

 

Thanks.

brian

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.

 

Annotation 2019-12-26 095035.png

  • User Experience Design

The Undo button in Alteryx has saved me many times! Unfortunately, I never know what all was "undone" when I click the button. It would be nice to update the Undo process in 2 ways:

  • Replicate the Excel undo drop down (which includes a brief description of what will be undone and allows you to undo multiple actions at once).

Undo.PNG

  • Move your location on the canvas to the area affected by the Undo-ing. Currently your location on the canvas doesn't change when you press Undo, even if the change being undone was off screen.

 

Alteryx Designer should automatically save my modules on a regular basis so that if I have a failure of some sort, my hard work will not be lost.

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.

  • User Experience Design

large.png

 

At present - to identify the dependencies of your workflow - you have to go to to "Advanced Settings" to find this critical capability.

(see @MattB 's great post here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Workflow-Dependencies/ta-p/49696 )

 

 

 

Could we instead move this to the workflow properties on the left hand side - this would be a more logical place to keep this info.

 

 

 

 

CC:  @rijuthav@jithinmony@HengHe@RajK@ydmuley@revathi@Deeksha@MPistone@Ari_Fuller@Arianna_Fuller@JoshKushner@samN@avinashbonu@Sunder_Sriram@Rahul_Thakur; @Rahul_Sing

  • User Experience Design

It would be really nice if we could save our own custom color palette when coloring tool containers and comments.

I use colors to define the purpose of my tool containers and it would be much easier if I could select a labeled, reusable color.

I recently ran into an issue where I had to remove my company's gallery from my Designer's Save As menu.  Unfortunately, figuring out how to do this in the UI took far longer than I anticipated, and I actually blew it away using the registry.  Eventually I found that when going to Save As, you can either remove it from the "Connecting" splash screen or you can press the gear from the Save As dialog box and remove the gallery that way, neither of which are an intuitive way to manage gallery removal.  I would advocate for adding an entry to the Advanced Options menu along with data source collections for adding/removing/modifying gallery connections.  

 

image.png

 

As this list of connection, dependency, and gallery management entries continues to grow, it may also make sense to remove it from "Advanced Options" and create a more descriptive "Data" or "Connections" menu or sub-menu.  I think it would be helpful to see aliases, in-db connections, dependencies, assets, and gallery management all grouped together within the interface.

  • User Experience Design

Hello .. me again!

 

Please can you fix the copy and paste of renames across field.  It's a behavior that I see in many tool's grids and drives me mad.  Its not just select. 

 

Take the attached screen shot.  In the select tool, i've renamed "test 2" to "rename2".  Fine it works. No issue.

 

I then copy rename2 and paste into the test3 field, and it copys the entire row's data (and metadata) into that little box, tabs, spaces the lot.  I end up with something like the screenshot.  Really not sure it was meant to be designed this way, as I cant really see the point.

 

Please can you fix this bug

 

Jay

Feature: If an instance of Alteryx is already running then on double clicking a *.yxmd file in Windows Explorer it should open in a New Tab of existing instance instead of launching another instance of Alteryx.

 

Issue: Each new instance of Alteryx puts load on the system memory due to an additional AlteryxGui.exe process.

 

Workaround: Currently we can drag & drop the *.yxmd file from Windows Explorer onto the running Alteryx instance to open in a new tab of the current instance but the same behaviour on double clicking the *.yxmd would be highly appreciated. 

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