Alteryx 2011 - New Features - Connection Progress

I don't know how many Alteryx users are familiar with Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)?  It is Mircosoft's attempt at an Alteryx Engine type tool which I could write a whole article about.  But I'm not going to risk boring you with what I see as SSIS's shortcomings.  All I will say is I was very disappointed with SSIS when it was released and when I started using Alteryx I never looked back.

However this time last year there were two features of SSIS which I thought Alteryx lacked. 

The first was the ability to hide away sections of the module in collapsible sections.  At Extend 2010 Ned demonstrated this same functionality in Alteryx courtesy of Tool Containers.  After that demo I mentioned to Ned that now there was only one thing which I thought was better about SSIS than Alteryx, namely the displaying of record counts on data connections.

Well now in Alteryx 2011 we have connection progress in real time as data flows through them.  These are a great new feature and allow users to:

• See progress of the module more easily
• See mistakes in their module before it completes processing
• Easily check joins and filters are behaving as expected without needing to cross reference to the log
• Identify inefficiencies in their modules

The below video shows them in action:

Alteryx 2011 - New Features - Keyboard Shortcuts

This was going to be a post on the new keyboard shortcuts available in Alteryx 2011, but as I was writing it I found that there were already some keyboard shortcuts which I didn't know about in Alteryx 5.0.  So I thought I would make this a complete list of all the keyboard shortcuts available in Alteryx (for those of you who like that kind of thing...)

Ctrl+N - New Module
Ctrl+O - Open Module
Crtl+S - Save Module
Crtl+R - Run Module/Cancel Module

F1 - Help on what is selected
F5 - Refresh Config

Crtl+Z - Undo
Ctrl+Y - Redo

Ctrl+X - Cut
Ctrl+C - Copy
Ctrl+V - Paste

Del  - Delete what is selected

Ctrl+F - Find Tool

Ctrl+Tab - Switch between open modules

Ctrl+Mouse Scroll Wheel - Zoom in/out

New in Alteryx 2011

Ctrl+Alt+B - Show Toolbar
Ctrl+Alt+T - Show Toolbox
Ctrl+Alt+V - Show Overview
Ctrl+Alt+O - Show Output Window
Ctrl+Alt+P - Show Properties Window

Please let me know if there are any more that I have missed off the list.

Alteryx 2011 Released

A slightly belated post due to my busy life at the moment, but no less exciting for the delay.  Alteryx 2011 is now released!  Check out the offical blog here.

It is fully rebranded with the new Alteryx brand colors and logo which look great:

It comes with a whole host of exciting new features which are going to enable users to do more with Alteryx and do things more easily!

Some of the new features include (follow the links for more details):

• Iterative macros
• Tool containers
• Record counts on connections
• Enhanced macro and wizard editing
• New charting tool with new chart types including a box and whisker chart.
• Treeview control for macros and wizards
• KML read support
• Solocast tools
• Document Constants (I can see these transforming how macros and wizards are built)
• Module packager

Looks like it's going to be an exciting release!  Look out for blog posts on some of the new features here when I have a bit more time.