Alteryx Analytics 2018.4 – A fresh new modern look

[AshleyK]

It's that time of year where we start to reflect on the past and plan for the future. While we are focusing on driving innovations for next year, it's important to look back across our busy year here at Alteryx. In case you missed any of our announcements this year...

• To continue to help solve the first mile of analytics challenge of discovering and cataloging your data and assets, we added over a dozen metadata loaders in Alteryx Connect, continued driving integration within the Alteryx platform, made deployment faster and added asset recommendations to help you get to that next question and answer.
• In Alteryx Designer, the cornerstone of our end-to-end modern analytics platform, we added Visualytics to allow you to visualize your data in an interactive way along your workflow and also added the ability to publish an interactive dashboard to Server Gallery to share insights with others.  Other exciting features include: standing ovation worthy caching functionality to speed your time to insights; 3 new code-friendly tools including Apache Spark, Deploy, and Python tools which increase collaboration between data scientists and analysts to leverage powerful code across workflows and models; over a dozen new data connectors; 3 new languages; and enhancements like one-click tool alignment to make your analytics process easier at every step.
• To more easily scale and share your analytics, you can now give each job on Alteryx Server a priority level to ensure the critical answers are delivered first and dedicate a specific node for workers which meets your growing geographical needs. Also, with high availability (HA) and SAML SSO Auth for Gallery, your enterprise can share insights seamlessly and securely.
• Finally, we introduced Alteryx Promote to empower data scientists to solve the last mile challenge in analytics, to help operationalize their models, and continue to integrate Promote across the platform as well as including built-in Visualytics to give immediate insight into the health of models.

If that's not enough to make you upgrade immediately, we've got more in store for you. With 2018.4, we enable you to connect to even more data, expand our global capabilities and bring to you a fresh new modern look for the modern end-to-end analytics platform.

Fresh new modern look

One thing I never tire of hearing about is how much everyone loves that Alteryx empowers them to do things they once thought were impossible. We've focused on adding the functionality needed to drive the modern end-to-end analytics platform to be indispensable to your analytics journey, and in this release we are proud to bring you a fresh new look in Designer so that it looks as powerful as it feels. You'll notice when you open Designer that there is a new splash screen as well as an overall modern look with a dark blue reskin, slick new icons and a new modern font. We've made it easier to use by moving key functionality closer to the canvas where you are working. The 'Run' button is now big, blue and inline with newly relocated 'schedule workflow' and 'run as analytic app' buttons. Easily zoom in and out of the canvas to navigate those mile-long workflows with ease and start a new workflow just like you would in your internet browser.

Besides updating Designer, we also gave the Server admin homepage a face lift with a new dashboard. Upon login, admins can immediately see vital diagnostic and usage information such as the number of users and connected worker machines. You can now easily understand how your cluster is configured and identify constraints in resources that can impact performance.

Connect to more data, easier

The amount of data you need to analyze from different sources will only continue to surge as evidenced by nearly 50,000 Instagram posts, over 73,000 online transactions, and over 3 million GB of internet data generated every minute of every day. At Alteryx, we know you need to connect to all of this data so we continue to make it easier for you to reach every data source to make critical data-driven decisions. Starting at the first mile of analytics in Alteryx Connect, there is a new PostgreSQL metadata loader. Within Designer, we now support .gzip as an input data source and you can now use conditional SQL statements with the Write Data In-DB tool. For our code-friendly data scientists out there, you can use the Python Tool to bring in your Python Jupyter notebooks that were written outside of Alteryx to leverage existing code to help support the analysts in your organization. To speed up the deployment of your predictive models, data scientists can now import custom R and Python packages from private remote repositories using Promote. 

Continuing to expand globally

At Alteryx, we are excited to make it easier for analysts and data scientists around the globe to experience the thrill of solving. With this release, we are expanding our linguistic capabilities by localizing Designer in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to join our ever-growing list including French, German and Japanese. Simply choose which language you want when you install 2018.4 and navigate Designer fully in Portuguese or Spanish. Besides expanding our product capabilities, we are also offering more robust website support in French and German so you can find what you are looking for in the language you feel most comfortable. Additionally, you can expand your own data analytics capabilities with your colleagues via the new French Community site in beta, with more languages to follow soon.

While these are just the highlights of the exciting new features in Alteryx Analytics 2018.4, I encourage you to look at more in-depth details about these features including our deep dive into the new look and updated technical documentation.

We hope you are excited about the new offerings in Alteryx Analytics 2018.4. For existing customers, you can experience the breadth of our new offering by upgrading to our latest release. There is plenty more coming and we welcome you to participate in our beta program and help shape our next release.

For those exploring the Alteryx platform, take our latest build for a test drive with our free trial and see for yourself why thousands of analysts choose Alteryx to tackle their biggest analytic challenges.

[T_Willins]

Love the new layout and features; not so much the new, modern font.  I didn't see a place in user settings to change the font.  It would be great for each user to be able to select the font.

[RachelW]

@T_Willins Can you tell me more about what you dislike about the new font? If you had the ability to change the font, what would you change it to?

Apologies in advance for a delay in responding to future comments, since I'll be out of town with family for the holiday next week. 

Rachel Wynn

Product Manager, Designer

[cgoodman3]

Is there a way to install 2018.4 while keeping the previous version of Alteryx installed? I couldn't find a way of getting around this:

[NeilR]

@cgoodman3 You can have up to two instances of Designer installed simultaneously. One must be the admin version, and the other the non-admin version...

[T_Willins]

Hi Rachel,

It is both the size of the font and the font type itself.  The thin style in white on the dark blue makes it difficult to initially focus (I had my teenage son look at it to make sure it was not just my "old eyes"). 

[RachelW]

@T_Willins Thanks for the clarification! We will be making some additional changes to the Designer UI for the next release. We'll consider your feedback about the font when making those changes. 

[neilgallen]

I'm a big fan of the 2018.4 UI, however there is one small change I'd like: in the results window the labelling for each input and output has been dropped. Not a big deal for most tools, but where the tool has multiple inputs and outputs it's nice to have them labelled in some way to ensure I remember which one I'm looking at.

[RachelW]

@neilgallen You caught on oversight on our part! We will make the text a different color for the next release. I'm sorry for the inconvenience! 

The text looks exceptionally bad on your computer. Would you be willing to share some additional details, so I can pass them on to our quality assurance team? In your display settings, will you share the settings for scale and resolution? Also, what version of Windows are you running? What type of monitors do you use? 

[neilgallen]

@RachelW Sure thing. Glad I can help.

Laptop Screen resolution: 1920x1080. It's scaled within windows at 125%. 

For what it's worth, it's a Lenovo P50 running Windows 7, but I'm upgrading to 10 soon I believe.

I'll get the specs on my desk monitor setup later, as I'm not in the office at the moment. It was just as bad there as it was on the laptop.

[keith_ivanchan]

I know that the new 18.4 look and feel is going for the "minimalist" approach but for the love of god please add back the icons.

I know I can use hot keys or additional mouse clicks through menu items, but quickly clicking on a Save or Undo / Redo icon in the older version saved me keystrokes and clicks.

After using 2018.4 for a while everything else is fine, but in my opinion removing the Save and Undo icons is taking it a little too far...

[Anuj]

looks like the server and the desktop has to be the same version. we had 2018.03 on the server and we were unable to see the schedules on 2018.3 desktop version

also when one of the desktop version was 2018.4 and the server was 2018.3 the desktop wasnt able to see the schedule 

[KMiller]

Hi there, really enjoying the new look and feel however I have noticed an issue with the Interactive Chart tool. 18.3 supported negative bar chart values however it appears 18.4 does not. I have checked the data coming into the chart and everything seems the same as before except the visual. I was using two levels to the chart, one for positive and one for negative values and the negative values will no longer show. Has anyone else highlighted this yet. Thanks

[DHB]

I second @keith_ivanchan please bring these back to the ribbon at the top;

• Save
• Undo
• Redo
• Open Workflow

[DHB]

And;

• New Workflow

[apolly]

@KMiller Thanks for raising the issue with negative numbers in the Interactive Charting tool. We will investigate this and determine what work needs to be done to fix this issue.

[ups366]

@RachelW , Dear Ms. , hello !

If you will made some changes for below, when about the release date ? thanks a  lot !

1- make the text a different color for the next release.

2- bring previous tool-bar  back to the ribbon at the top.

3- Add advance option for change the UI font [ like font: Microsoft YaHei UI ]. (can get better display effects for both and English & Aisa / Chinese character)

[RachelW]

@ups366 Thanks for the comment. We will continue to make changes to the way Designer looks and we will consider these changes for future releases. 

[JacobMoncla]

I love the clean interface and placement of the run button!

[james204]

I echo the calls for a return of the font from 2018.3 (the new font is too 'tall and thin' to be easy on the eyes, especially on the dark background), as well as a return of the ribbon with buttons for save / undo / redo / new workflow.

Edit: another functionality I've just noticed that appears to have been lost is the ability to scroll through the tabs on the tool palette using the scroll wheel on the mouse.

[Faraz0605]

If i may voice my opinion ,I think the dark designers Tool Pallet bar is not visually appealing and users should be able to choose a skin. The font from 2018.3 seems to be better than .4 version. Having the Run button at the end is something which is not very appealing. 

[AW25]

To echo james204's comment on the scroll wheel -- I would also like to see the ability to scroll through the tool ribbon using the the mouse scroll wheel restored. I always find it odd when software updates remove functionality rather than add to it...