Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
We're proud to announce that 24.2 Designer and Server are here. At Alteryx, we believe in continuously innovating in big and small ways to ensure you get the tools you need to be the most effective analytics professional possible. Whether you're looking to perform analysis faster, ensure your workflows run properly every time, or make it easier for others to understand your data transformation logic and results, 24.2 has helpful new enhancements that you're going to want to take advantage of.
For this release, the Alteryx team has focused on delivering innovations that give you the ability to:
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Connect everywhere with new connectors and marketplace integration improvements
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Enjoy a more personalized experience via customization, accessibility, and modernized alerts
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Power up with new tools, functions, and options
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Breeze through workflow admin in Server with new tools, API functions, and more
Read on to learn more about all the capabilities you'll find in Designer and Server 24.2. And get ready to upgrade your analytics!
Connect Everywhere with New Connectors and Marketplace Integration Improvements
Analysis starts by connecting to data you want to interrogate. That's why we're continually adding support for more data sources. In this release you'll find new connectors to popular data sources that you've requested: Google Cloud Storage and SingleStore.
Analysis never truly ends, but it does deliver results. And those results go everywhere—enterprise applications, dashboards, and BI tools. So, we're also adding a connector to Qlik, coming soon.
Learn more about how all these connectors work and the best ways to use them here.
We understand that analysis doesn't happen in a vacuum. And you need to connect to more than just data sources and output systems. You need to connect to the greater ecosystem of capabilities and extensions to customize and optimize your experience in Designer. That's why we're pleased to announce several improvements to Alteryx Marketplace’s integration with Designer. Since its beta launch in Designer 24.1, we've received immense positive feedback from the community about how helpful it is to access Marketplace without ever leaving Designer. We want to make it easy for you to extend and customize Designer to your exact needs, and we're happy to share that this integration is now generally available.
In addition to downloading new add-ons and connectors, you can now also update your installed connectors. Plus, the Marketplace integration will only offer you add-ons and connectors that are compatible with your specific version of Designer. So, there's no need to worry you might accidentally install something that won't work properly. Learn all about how to take advantage of Marketplace add-ons in Designer in the help docs.
Enjoy a More Personalized Experience via Customization, Accessibility, and Modernized Alerts
The 24.2 Designer release is especially exciting because it’s stuffed with enhancements that you, the Alteryx Maveryx Community, have been asking for! In Designer 24.2 you'll find innovations like the ability to customize the colors of tool connectors on the canvas, the ability to set your own custom defaults for a variety of Designer tools, and the ability to title your tool containers with as many lines of text as you'd like!
The best part? These customizations were all your ideas! For example, you requested connection colors in Community threads like this one: Color connections between tools, and you requested multi-line container titles here: Split container title into a couple of rows. In addition, we've been hearing about a desire to set your own custom tool defaults across Community in threads like this one: Comment Tool should offer default preference option. Learn all about how to take advantage of these new capabilities and make Designer your own in this post.
In addition, I'm pleased to share with you that Designer continues to advance in the realm of accessibility. We know that many users either cannot or prefer not to use their mouse heavily in Designer, so we're pleased to share that Designer 24.2 comes with a variety of new keyboard shortcuts. You can perform a variety of new actions mouse-free, including opening user settings, checking workflow dependencies, exporting your workflow, and more. Instead of digging through menus and mousing around, in just a few keystrokes you're there! Check out all the helpful new keyboard shortcuts available to you in Designer in the release notes.
When you first run a workflow in 24.2 Designer, you'll notice that its alerts have received makeover.
We hope that this adjustment to alerts’ prominence and the introduction of color coding will make it even easier to interact with Designer. Please tell us what you think! We're always listening, and we welcome your ideas.
Power Up with New Tools, Functions, and Options
Designer’s enhancements for 24.2 don't stop with aesthetics. We've also added extra analytic horsepower so you can work with more complex data and get common operations done more quickly.
When you open Designer 24.2, you'll be greeted by a new member of the Preparation tab: the Rank tool!
Much like the enhancements in the previous section, the new Rank tool was also your idea! With Rank, you can rank your data in multiple ways, including ordinal, dense, and standard ranking. Faster and easier ranking than ever before. Learn all about how to work with Rank in the help docs.
Sometimes you need to customize your transformations with expressions, and we know you appreciated the update we made to the expression editor in the Filter and Formula tools. That’s why I’m pleased to share that now you’ll find the latest and greatest expression editor in the Multi-Field Formula and Multi-Row Formula tools!
Multi-Field Formula Tool
Multi-Row Formula Tool
Now you can enjoy capabilities like automatic syntax highlighting and predictive text, which will help you develop and evaluate your complex multi-row and multi-column formulas faster and more easily than before.
Do you work with semi-structured JSON data? If so, the updated JSON Parse tool has 2 new options (when using the AMP engine) that help you un-nest JSON objects in columns or flatten arrays, making it easier for you to access and analyze the data you want.
We hope you have fun with these new tool functions. If you enjoy experimenting with new capabilities like these, we’d love to include you in the Alteryx Pilot Program.
Breeze Through Workflow Admin in Server with New Tools, API Functions, and More
If you're a Server user, you know just how valuable it is to have visibility into workflow runs, assets, resource usage, and job history. So, we've made several enhancements to Server to make it easier for admins to manage their environment programmatically, navigate the Server UI, and take advantage of important capabilities like Data Connection Manager (DCM).
We're adding new functionality to Server’s API in 24.2, so admins can gain even greater efficiency by managing their Servers through automated commands. The new API functionality includes the ability to schedule Analytic Apps, retrieve all jobs, and issue calls for Studios. If you'd like more information about how to take advantage of Server’s API, please check out the help docs. And more information about the new functionality specifically is available as of 24.2 is in Server’s release notes.
If you’d rather manage Server directly through its user interface, not to worry—we've made enhancements to improve your efficiency on that front as well. For example, you’ll find Server 24.2 offers improvements to search and sort capabilities, lets you delete operations in bulk, and even shows you lists of recent workflows when adding to collection via a drop-down.
Learn more about these enhancements and more in this dedicated post.
If you're not already familiar with DCM, it offers secure and centralized storage for your connection credentials. You can learn more about DCM here. We've heard your feedback that manually updating connections in complex workflows can take a lot of time and energy. So, we're introducing a new DCM Gallery migration tool and the ability to migrate connection aliases to DCM in bulk. Learn how to take advantage of the new capabilities in this post.
We're always interested to hear about your ideas for improving Server! Please be sure to contribute your thoughts, feedback, and feature requests for Server in our Server ideas board.
Additional Enhancements
A few helpful capabilities we know you’ll be pleased to see in Designer:
- Centralized Proxy Authentication: Now available in Public Preview, this new user setting lets you choose and prioritize the proxy connections to use with given data sources. This gives you more control over which domains have proxies applied to them, and it provides additional authentication options for those proxy connections. Learn more in the release notes.
- Unicode Normalize function: Now you can work more easily with text from different encodings, as this function will allow you to treat text strings equivalently no matter the original encoding.
- Cross-Tab Tool update: In the past, if your data had special characters in the column title, those characters used to be replaced with an underscore (“_”). As this can sometimes make it challenging to send your transformed data back to your source, you can now choose whether to preserve special characters in column names.
And capabilities that you don't want to miss in Server:
- New Enterprise Utilities: Keep an eye open for upcoming Utilities capable of reporting on Server usage and transferring assets among Server users. If you'd like to see the full complement of available enterprise utilities here, today, visit the help docs.
- Studios: Server is going to hang on to Studios! We heard your feedback and understood that many of you value Studios' function. So, if you wish to continue using Studios, you can. We’ll just be moving to a model of allowing one user per Studio to improve the management of assets.
Although this post provides a good overview of the major enhancements coming to Designer and Server 24.2, it's not an exhaustive list! There is so much good stuff in the latest release. We encourage you to learn more about it. And to make that as easy as possible, we’re putting on a Product Update Webinar this week just for you. Please join us!
If you’d like to learn more about the Alteryx Platform and all that's coming your way through the broader Fall Release, please visit this helpful post.
Upgrade to 2024.2 Today
We built Designer and Server 2024.2 based on your feedback and ideas, and we can’t wait to see what you create with their new capabilities! To read more about everything in store in 2024.2, head over to Technical Documentation. We also love hearing your thoughts and suggestions! Please share your ideas on our Idea Boards.
But That’s Not All ... Want a Sneak Peek at What’s Next?
As we continue our journey of innovation and partnership, we invite you to join us for our upcoming Product Update Webinar. It’s your exclusive opportunity to dive deeper into our product roadmap and see how Alteryx is evolving to help you drive even more value with analytics.
We also invite our customers to learn more about the new features we’re working on behind the scenes in our Pilot Program. Join, and you can play a vital role in testing new features and providing feedback directly to the Alteryx Product and Engineering team.
