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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Featured Ideas

 

 

US and Canada datasets are underlined so far but,

 

Alteryx is expanding towards, Denmark, Germany, France and several other countries...

The question is; Why don't we have Eurostat data provided as well?

 

 

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Bulk options for some datasets are available.

Even one can get a grasp on micro datasets and Alteryx may have a deal inf this micro dataset is anonymized...

 

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Picture6.png

 

 

 

 

With more and more tools, macros, drivers installed and an increasing complexity, it is common to place a call for help with Alteryx Customer Support, Alteryx Community, and any person who is willing to help.

 

Unfortunately, it often ends with a helpful person asking for lots of details looking like following daunting list:

- Version of Alteryx Designer

- Installed Alteryx licenses

- Versions of drivers (ODBC, OCI, OLEDB, etc.)

- Screen resolution

- OS

- RAM, CPU, Available disk space

- Environment variables

- Installed tools (%APPDATA% and %PROGRAMDATA%) and versions

- Error Logs (potentially event logs)

- Antivirus and versions

- R packages installed out of Alteryx (with locations and versions)

- Extra Python packages installed

- Any Python/R distribution installed

- Status of Alteryx Service (for Designer with Scheduler)

- RuntimeSettings.xml

- Python tool installation logs

- list of autosave files (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Alteryx\Autosave)

- AlteryxService logs (for Scheduler)

- Alteryx Gallery logs (not relevant for Designer, fair enough).

- etc.

 

These are just examples...

 

 

Note that:

  • Some of these details are available via msinfo32.exe.
  • Community contains a few workflows to help with this tedious task (useful if Designer could work and if you can find such workflows)

 

 

Instead it could easier to:

- Click on an entry under Help menu

- Click on an icon on the Desktop 

- Run a command line

to generate a report and attach (if wanted) logs

 

Same external program could be used for these tasks (external so it could work even if Alteryx product was "broken").

 

 

In terms of benefits:

- for end users: easy to use (no need to remember x locations that might change between versions) 

- for local IT: easy to use and good tool to generate a snapshot of a machine with an Alteryx product installed on it

- for anybody involved in support (local champions, Alteryx support team(s), Alteryx Community, etc.): better support since there would be one thing to ask instead of risking to miss something important. Potential patterns (incompatibility with antivirus, else) would be easier to spot too.

 

 

This would provide a new -better?- way for anyone involved in helping users (including Community) and could be helpful in case of escalation.

 

 

Thanks,

 

PaulN

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

We have been running into an issue lately where a workflow error thrown by a message tool was not properly halting execution of downstream tools.  It appears that the Message and Test tools do not actually throw an error in the engine, but rather just write the error to the log so even if you have your workflow set to Cancel on Error, they won’t kill the workflow.

 

After doing some exploring, it seems that there are four different ways to detect and raise error conditions in workflows:

  1. Test tool
  2. Message tool with "Error" set as the message type
  3. Message tool with "Error - And Stop Passing Records Through This Tool" set as the message type
  4. An Error Message tool wrapped inside of a macro

Methods 1 and 2 will not properly kill execution, while methods 3 and 4 will kill execution and stop downstream processing.  If a user wants to flag an issue in their log, but not stop execution of a workflow, the warning would work well, and I think ensuring that each of these methods properly kills execution of workflows would alleviate confusion and potential errors.

 

I have attached a workflow highlighting the four different scenarios outlined above.  If the green containers are both disabled, the output will still write despite errors in the workflow and "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" turned on.

Hi Team,

 

Version: 2019.3

 

Issue:

As what title said, it was hard to see the records display when the records is too large.

 

I have to adjust the Config Window to see the records. It is pain when checking a workflow with Join.

 

Suggestion:

1. Used fraction:   100,000/1,000,000 Records Displayed

2. Change based on the size it have, minimum will be 1,000,000 Records. Partial displayed will show if it expand.

3. Reduce the space for Search Bar, only Expand if selected.

4. Use another line. 

 

Appendix

10 Records (no Issue)

1 Million Records1 Million Records

 

1 Miillion Records (Issue to see the records)

10 Records10 Records

In a large enterprise - one of the key challenges is cleaning data in a consistent way.    Many of the big EIM stacks have tooling for this which allows end users to create data cleanup rules, and the Microsoft version is called DQS (Data Quality Services).

 

Can we please add a connector to alteryx to allow us to drop a DQS cleaning tool onto a canvas - and then the 3 outputs will be

  • data cleaned by DQS rules (managed by the data steward)
  • error data that is invalid
  • any status messages from the DQS call?

This would allow Line of Business users to build their own data cleaning rules consistently in one place, an lift this burden from the data analyst.

 

Thank you 

Sean

 

The Text Box tool has a tickbox allowing a multi line "answer" to be supplied for the question.

But it does not allow you to easily setup the question as multi line i.e. with carriage returns

 

Please allow the ability to enter multi line text for the Question of the Text Box Tool.

 

At the moment, I force carriage returns to happen, by entering a bunch of space characters in the "Enter the text or question to be displayed" box of of the "Text Box" tool. This is obviously not ideal.

 

Example of desired layout for App question:

multi line question example.PNG

 

example showing how entering a bunch of spaces can be used to force a carriage return:

entering bunch of space characters to make a carriage return.PNG

 

Hi Team,

 

I couldn't find much on enhancing the Tool Container tool searching.

 

I am doing some work on a large workflow today and have replaced three tool containers with multiple containers within them with macros in order to simplify the overall workflow. Doing this work, I need to document the purpose of this simplification to my stakeholders within the business in terms of business value, and one aspect I thought of would be how much time is saved by wrapping all of these tools within a macro, another is how many tools are visible on the canvas, and therefore how by modulising (creating macros rather than tool containers) sections of the workflow it is much easier to see what's happening to the data

 

My macro replaces 50 tools with one and therefore this is quite a key quantifiable piece of business value that I can communicate.

 

In order to count the tools within the old container I had to do this manually. I was wondering - rather than manually count all of the tools within the old container - Could there be some functionality built into Tool containers such as a profiling tool similar to the browse? So that when you clicked on the tool container you would get some simple profiling, summary of the tools used?

 

Any thoughts welcome!

 

Ciaran

 

Product Suggestions - (2) Tool Containers.PNG

 

 

Currently, Alteryx can connect to FileMaker via an ODBC connection, and for the most part, it works great. The only issue I've hit thus far is when importing data with foreign text in it - Arabic and Cyrillic text specifically – sometimes the data comes in correctly, and sometimes it’s turned into garbage characters. I’m not sure how widely used FileMaker is, but the full support for it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

~Chrispy

In the Overview pane - can you please show which tools have completed the current run, when viewing this pane during a canvas run?   That would allow for a progress check at a glance.

If a user selects 10 Input tools, the ability to then right click and be able to "Insert After" to a Union tool and have all the Inputs attach to the Union would be great!

I'd love to see easier access to Sample Data.  Often while training, we run into issues with the location of sample data being different for different users (even on the same call) based on whether or not they are using the admin or non-admin version.  Being able to quickly navigate directly to the sample data location would allow for easier access. 

Right now there is not an exception join in DB which means if I want to remove records I have to filter on NULL and with large tables this is really inefficient.

Hello, 

I am not sure if this capability exists but I assume it does not.

We have a need to optimize a Linear Program (LP) model that consists of a system of equations and has both:
An objective function and a series of constraints. One of the software capabilities that SAS offers that currently
Alteryx does not have is this optimization capability. 

I am wondering if the capability is currently not available, is this capability in the Product Roadmap?

Thanks,

Ricardo

Would it be possible to change the field size so it’s larger than 1 for Anchor Abbreviations?

Some of my macro’s have multiple input/outputs and having more than 1 letter/number designations would be great! I know it’s probably a limitation because of the icon size, so maybe we could have the choice to use larger icons (especially when it’s a complex macro - it would accentuate it's importance).

 

PS. Wasn't it larger in older version of Alteryx?

 

Motivate_Insights_v2yxmc.JPG

As I have a lot of documentation to write on my Alteryx process, I would like to simple copy the lower table from the Visual Query Builder :

 

2016_06_23_16_12_15_Photos.png

I noticed when viewing the Browse tool results, the user can now select records, then right click and have options to copy the records. I like this, just thinking it would be even cooler if there were options to open selected records in a new window as well. So the user could select the records, right click, choose open in new window, and then get the expanded viewing window to view the selected records. 

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.

 

Macro XML Image.png

 

 

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.

 

Image Tool with Stored Image.png

 

 

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. 

Any python user will tell you that one of the reasons why python is so powerful is the ability to access values using their indexes. It would be great if alteryx had such a system in place too, where you can access values or loop over them using their index, which can then be applied in creating new columns or calculations. 

 

P.S - I know we can use the python tool but I would rather see this ability built in the formula tool.

 

 

 

After upgrading to version 10.5, my workflows become unreadable for community members on versions prior to it.  It would be nice if either the prior versions can (with warning) open the workflow or if I can readily export/downgrade the version header.  I understand that if the workflow contains elements unique to the new version that this would be problematic, but it would be helpful to have.

 

There is a NOTEPAD solution that I use where I edit the XML,

 

Thanks for consideration.

 

Mark

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