Can we group product ideas together; and create some new tags?

[SeanAdams]

Hi all,

Reading through the product ideas raised by the community - it strikes me that there are significant clusters.   Two jump out - improvements to date/time handling & parsing, and caching.

This is not a suggestion about either of these topics, but a question about how we look at and structure these ideas.   Let's take the date-time ones (full list is below) as a worked example:

- there are 23 distinct ideas (or 22 if you exclude the one about generating random dates) which relate to the treatment (mainly parsing; formatting or constructing) of dates & times

- None of these individually has enough votes to get them onto the "hot ideas" list - however when you look in aggregate across them, the theme of "standardizing and enriching date-time processing" is probably one of the hottest topics at the moment.

Two suggestions:

Tagging: If we are able to spot these patterns - and then create a tag that is related to this (in this case "DateTime handling") - the product team would probably be able to do some pretty interesting analytics.

Grouping: In order to allow people to spot these BEFORE they log the next idea which is trying to achieve the same thing - is it worth the community creating a grouped-up idea which then becomes persistent if there is a clear trend; and we can link out to these ideas?   For example an idea saying "standardize & Enrich treatment of date time", which then becomes a sticky item at the top of the forum so that folks don't have to search for pages to see if their idea is a duplicate.

NOTE: this second one (grouping) will also save time for the product team because they won't have to spend as much time flagging duplicates...

Hope this makes sense - as always, happy to help in thinking about potential solutions.

Note: the 23 ideas related to date-time treatment are captured below (as a worked example), and the authors of these ideas have been tagged out of courtesy

@DultonM @braxtone @Philip @AshokBhatt @CSchrader @dawid_nawrot @jdunkerley79 @Joe_Lipski @ChadB @nicholas_carstens @GGuenther @AndrewW @RachelW

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Refactor-Date-time-treatment/idi-p/46420

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/DateTime-Tool-Enhancements-Convert-Multiple-F...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Time-Based-Function/idi-p/4842

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/More-forgiving-evaluations-of-Date-and-DateTi...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Have-a-way-to-easily-get-date-parts-out-of-a-...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/DateTimeTrim-Function-Add-Week-Trimming/idi-p...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Add-DateTime-type-with-milliseconds/idi-p/200...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Alteryx-making-dating-easier/idi-p/20625

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Make-d-and-m-in-DateTimeFormula-work-if-no-le...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Null-Date-Check/idi-p/13116

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/CreateDate-Function/idi-p/55171

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Update-existing-field-in-DateTime-tool/idi-p/...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Allow-Date-DateTime-Time-output-from-Regex-Pa...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Update-existing-field-in-DateTime-tool/idi-p/...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/DateTimeFirstOfWeek-Formula-Function/idi-p/14...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Date-Time-Formatting-Beginning-with-2-Digit-Y...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Have-a-Time-Question-in-Analytic-Apps/idi-p/1...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Impute-Dates/idi-p/1509

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/DateTimeTrim-for-Year/idi-p/35805

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Next-potential-improvement-to-formula-tools/i...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Improvements-to-the-Select-Tool/idi-p/33834

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/random-inputs/idi-p/54222

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Field-Sumary-tool-should-report-all-data-type...

[braxtone]

I'm fine merging into an overall feature request, but I do want to make sure what we put together is something defined rather than "generally make date parsing better".

If the new idea calls out that Alteryx should be able to handle the full ISO 8601 date standard, then I'll vote it up and point to it in my related question https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Parsing-ISO8601-Formatted-Dates/m-p/55271

[SeanAdams]

Absolutely agree with you @braxtone

I think the way that I'd phrase the requirement is in 4 parts:

- standardize the way that alteyx deals with dates (eliminate the inconsistencies between the various different ways of dealing with dates - some use parameters like 'dd-mm-yyyy", some use parameters like "months' some use parameters like "%a-%y".        These standard parameters need to include quarters, months, date, week  number, month name & number, week day number and name, hours (12 and 24 hr), minutes, seconds and miliseconds.    All of this either padded or not.

- As part of this standardization, allow users to specify date formats flexibly, including ISO standard dates, but also including all the various combinations of mm; MM, yy, YY, etc

- Extend the date-time trim and date-part type functions to include every version of date parts

- create the ability to create dates from primitive date parts

These 4 bullets summarise a very large portion of the ideas in the "improving dates & times" bucket.

[braxtone]

Works for me!

[LeahK]

Hey @SeanAdams,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. Labels are the current mechanism we have in place to "tag" ideas into feature specific "groups."

We've also recently separated Product Ideas into individual Product areas, which we believe is a step in the right direction. 

[SeanAdams]

:-) thank you @LeahK

Where there's a natural cluster - is there a way that the community can create a label for this cluster (such as "Additions to Date Time Functions")?

Alternatively - is this something that is done as part of the regular product management process of backlog grooming?

BTW - very much agree with you - grouping by product really does help!

[WillM]

We've made a lot of strides in the product ideas area of the Alteryx Community since this idea has been submitted. Parts of this have been implemented, and we've made some pretty significant improvements.  I'm moving this to Not Planned for the time being, but if there are still parts of this idea that are relevant to the current iteration of ideas, feel free to submit a new one for review!