The Customer Love Chronicles: One Whole Year of Delightful Designer Stories

[NicoleJ]

One of my favorite things to do this time of year is to curl up with a good book and listen to the rain outside my window.

[Source: AI Generated] NOTE: I live in a very rainy place, so to be fair, I could technically do this about 9-10 months out of the year... but for the sake of this story, we’ll pretend rainy days are a novel thing!

I love how you can immerse yourself in a good book – imagining distant lands, pondering new puzzles and philosophies, and – let's be honest – getting far too invested in the lives of fictional characters. There are a lot of different things to read in this big world – so many creative and wild ideas that have been put down on paper in a variety of formats for a multitude of purposes!

It turns out there are a lot of creative ideas on Community that we’ve put down on paper (er, software) too this past year, so I’m going to tell you a wonderful little love story about some Designer customers and all the fantastic, magical ideas they helped us bring to life in 2024!

Choose Your Own Adventure

My favorite genre of books to read when I was a kid was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. A different story! Every time! And I had all the power to control the characters’ destiny! Children everywhere love getting to choose how a tale unfolds: open the door on the left or the one on the right, fight the dragon or hide in the haunted woods, befriend the witch or follow the wizard.

Well, we like to give our Designer users cool ways to choose their own design-time adventures too!

• With over 160 likes across a dozen unique ideas, it sounds like our Alteryx users definitely want to choose their own adventure when it comes to which default tool configuration options are selected! From changing the default format of a Comment tool to changing the transparency and margins of a Container, we’ve got you covered with Custom Tool Defaults on every tool, starting in 24.2! In fact, we liked this idea so much that we even brought one back from the “Not Planned” graveyard – talk about an adventure!

• Sometimes choosing not to do something is just as important as choosing to do something... which is why we’re giving you the ability to Disable a Single Formula Expression in 24.1, based on this request from Alteryx ACE @Watermark!

• Sometimes you want to take a long and winding path on your journey, but if you’re like ACE @Emil_Kos (or the 100+ users who upvoted these ideas), you might prefer to choose a narrower path for your container titles – which is why Multi-Line Container Titles are going to come in quite handy as of 24.2!

These multi-line Container titles tell a tale of their own! A nice, narrow tale that doesn’t wander all the way across the canvas!

• ACE @MarqueeCrew is always great at suggesting powerful ideas to speed up the path to workflow delivery – and when he suggested creating a capability to save and use workflow templates to get started on those workflow-building journeys faster, we thought that was a fabulous idea! Custom Workflow Templates (released in 23.2 and 24.1) let YOU choose how to get started on your next workflow adventure right from the start, allowing you to save multiple variations of those templates for a variety of use cases, from corporate branding and best practices to getting started with frequently used data sources just a little bit faster!  

• While we think it would be terribly sad to miss out on all the exciting updates that come with new versions of Designer, we get that you might have to wait to update for a variety of enterprise reasons (and seeing those pop-up notifications about new Designer versions will just make you sad that you can’t take that fun new path yet). So if you want to head into the Dark Forest of “No Notifications about New Designer Versions”, then we’ve got a new User Setting option in 24.2 that lets you opt out of those product update alerts! As a bonus, all users will see the benefit of new, Modernized Alerts for a variety of notifications throughout Designer. It's like stepping into a world of color! (We’re not in Kansas anymore...)

It’s a Graphic (Novel) World

Speaking of color... While I desperately try to come up with legitimate reasons to order one of those new color Kindles (despite having a brand-new black-and-white Kindle that is only a few months old), let’s all agree that there is something magical about bringing color to the black-and-white world of storytelling. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but these three UI brightening ideas from our Maveryx Community are worth at least 500 likes!

• Alteryx users @W_Hofer and @SergioR were envisioning a workflow-world of color with these ideas on Community – and with the 24.2 release, we’re so excited to bring Custom Connection Colors to life in Designer! Now, you can color ON the lines, choosing distinct colors to follow along different paths that data travels through your workflow. Want your True branch to be green and your False branch to be red? Bring those visions to life, my friends.

Always choose the pathway to snacks.

• There have been several ideas submitted over the years about graduating from the basic black and white expression editors in several of our tools to the modern syntax highlighting and predictive text in the updated expression editors used in the Formula and Filter tools... well we’re finally bringing @smoskowitz and ACE @PhilipMannering's ideas to life in 24.2 with Updated Expression Editors for the Multi-Row Formula and Multi-Field Formula tools! We might have one or two more tools getting updated expression editors in future releases too... (foreshadowing, anyone?)

• While we are adding all this color to the canvas and our tool configurations... don’t forget to watch out for eye strain and check out Dark Mode! We’re still making ongoing improvements to implement this idea, and we will likely be 1-2 more releases before we can call our Dark Mode conversion efforts complete, but these woods Designer UI elements are certainly looking lovely, dark and deep these days!

A Little Self-Help

I enjoy a good historical drama just like the next person, and sometimes you really just need some faeries and time travel in your life. Crime thriller? Sure. Sci-Fi-turned-blockbuster-film? Sign me up.

But every so often, it’s important to put away the fiction and invest in a little self-help by reading about tools that will help you move out, move on, and move up. And that’s what some of these Designer features are all about – little things that go a long way to helping you move through your Designer use cases faster!

• Keyboard Shortcuts are like life hacks – who doesn’t love a quick trick to do boring things faster?! And wow, did we introduce a bunch of new life hacks in our 24.2 release... From keyboard shortcuts for User Settings, Workflow Dependencies, and Global Search navigation, you can now zip around the Designer product even faster, right from the keyboard.

• Another (boring) thing that you might want to do faster is connecting to your proxy network from Designer... this functionality was pretty limited before, which is probably why all these ideas about enhanced proxy authentication have popped up on Community over the years. Well, with the 24.2 release, we are offering a preview of a New Proxy Connection Experience in User Settings, including the ability to connect to PAC files, use NTLM authentication, and set up several proxy methods to use in different scenarios!

• We know you can solve an unlimited number of use cases with the formula functions already available in Designer, but that’s not a reason why we can’t also help you out with some cool New Formula Functions! We can always use a little help from our formula friends:
  • Coalesce
  • IsLowercase & IsUppercase
  • DateTimeQuarter
  • FindNth
  • EqualStrings
  • Unicode Normalize

Short Stories, Novellas, and Poems – Oh My!

Finally, in today’s busy world, you don’t always have time to read a whole novel or invest in an epic series. You might just want a quick little story to pass the time on the train or a poem to read while you drink your morning coffee. Little stories can still contain powerful ideas – and little features in Designer can still have a powerful impact on your design-time experience!

Check out these short stories about some big Designer customer love (most of these implemented in the 24.2 release):

• Group By option in the Record ID tool: ACE @Jean-Balteryx and long-time Alteryx user @simon both submitted requests to add Group By functionality to the Record ID tool, to easily restart sequencing based on a group – wish granted!

Can a Group By function have groupies? If so, this one definitely has a huge fan base!

• Rank Tool: While it’s true that you could generate ranking using the combination of several other tools in Designer, it’s certainly a much quicker story to just introduce a new Rank tool – complete with several types of ranking methodology to choose from!

• Suppress Blank Files with the Output Tool: ACE @SeanAdams loves a good story – but opening a book to find a bunch of blank pages? No fun. And opening an output file just to realize there’s no data in it, just a bunch of column headers? Also no fun. So that’s why this idea is a great one – you can now choose an option in the Output tool to suppress the creation of output XLSX and XLSM files when there are no records in the data stream!

• Option in Cross Tab tool to Keep Special Characters in Column Names: This idea from @kelly_gilbert will save our users plenty of time fiddling with cumbersome workarounds to keep column names as-is... now, you have the option to keep special characters in your column names when pivoting data with the Cross Tab tool!

• And more! We’re constantly searching through Community for little ideas that will make a big impact, like making it easier to resize window borders, giving you the ability to debug your workflows when using Control Containers, and fixing odd little things like drop-down configuration options that randomly change when you scroll your mouse wheel over them... we hear you and love that you are so vocal about the big and little things we can do to make your Designer lives easier!

For those keeping score, that’s a LOT of ideas implemented in Designer in the past year, including many that didn’t make the cut in this multi-chapter blog novel today! We have at least 50 individual idea posts that were marked as Ongoing or Implemented this year, spanning 25+ unique Designer features in just 2 releases. Now that’s an epic adventure tale!

We hope this classic love story of analyst-meets-Designer has sparked your imagination – we can’t wait to see what new ideas you bring next to the Alteryx Community! And don’t you worry – we are already writing the next installment of this Designer adventure series, and we can tell it’s going to be a smash hit too! 😊

[Source: AI Generated] What will the next chapter of the Customer Love Chronicles bring? Stay tuned to find out!

Cheers,

NJ