Commenting Alteryx; Because Alzheimer's runs in the family...

About 62.5% of my ancestors rocked out to the surreal psychedelic trip that is dementia, which is probably mostly because they tend to live well into their eighties and nineties.  I'm certainly not complaining - I'm saying I forget things!

Like why I built what I built in Alteryx.

I would guess that a fair share of Alteryx users aren't trained programmers, and even so, they may not be big on the whole commenting concept that's out there in that field of practice.  I would guess that's particularly likely if you're coming from the business side of things.  Folks like me were brought up on Excel, where there really isn't much accommodation made for annotation and even named variables - an example of self-documenting code, are a relative rarity.

So, here's what I do, in the process of building out an Alteryx workflow:  I use the comment tool with every single tool to articulate what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  Oftentimes when I'm building a new workflow, the annotations are my starting point, rather than an afterthought.  

Perhaps it's surprising, but when faced with a blank page, I typically find comments to be an easier and more efficient way to get started.  By organizing my thought process in the comments first, followed by tools that align to those steps, I can easily order and reorder my operations without stressing about the details of configuring tools.  All those tools have to be configured to work right without complaining, whereas I can often jot down the concepts I'm working through in prose more quickly.

Of course, this is just one way of approaching a blank page and I do tend to get some tools out on the page pretty quickly.

Bottom line: Comments save a lot of time over the long haul, and it may even be a faster way to think out a new workflow.  It's like showing your work on a math problem.  It's usually worth the extra effort.