Getting Started with Make (Integromat): 30-Minute Crash Course

hey folks welcome so I'm here on make.com it used to be called integromat but they recently went through a renaming you could also start with something like a zapier but to be honest all the basic concepts are the same and it doesn't matter which tool you use what only matters is the apps that you're looking to automate are compatible with the automation tool that you use and make is pretty robust so we are going to go ahead and use make so this is the homepage just a marketing website and you can see all the different features and all the different use cases that they have mentioned here some nice Graphics but what matters to us is the actual automation editor so we will get to it by signing in I already have an account so I'm going to go ahead and click here sign in to make and my account is created with Google so I'm just going to click on sign in with Google if you don't have one you'll go through the standard setup process okay so here we are this is the dashboard when you are logged in you are greeted with a bunch of different information you have some graphs here that show you your usage and this will obviously depend how much usage you have available will depend on the plant that you have chosen up top you see a bunch of tabs and these are mostly to do with your team some users that are part of your team team your subscription options and so on and so forth and and then here you see some a list of some active scenarios that are currently part of your make ecosystem and are actually running and then on the left you have a a navigation bar which is where you will be spending most of the time to switch between scenarios templates to identify your existing connections and verify them looking at what web hooks you have as part of your workflows and so on and so forth yeah so pretty typical dashboard the idea is to make all the information available to you in one snapshot but yeah let's let's go ahead and look at some of these navigation options here scenarios is just the same thing as workflows make choose to call them scenarios but at the end of the day they're just your automation workflows um and then we have some templates I I'll go back to scenarios in a sec because we'll actually create a scenario later in this video but let's look at the templates first so templates are essentially automation workflows that people have built these are just make users who have built these workflows and they have chosen to share these with other make users so that they can leverage these workflows as well so these are a great source of inspiration you don't have to use them or you can use them and then extend them it's totally up to you but it's a great way to just browse here and see what all is available what are the kinds of things that people do and so it would just spark ideas for things that you could automate yourself you could also filter it down by a particular app that you might have in mind for example I want to see if there's something around weather that I can do and there's a couple of weather apps here so I'll click on one of them and see okay what kind of workflows people have built using these applications so yeah so you can search for your favorite app or app that you have in mind to automate and then take the inspiration and go from there okay so let's go let's keep going here next up is connections so connections are all the apps that I have authorized make to call on my behalf so it's a pretty typical authentication process whenever you're going to automate an application you need to authorize make to call it on your behalf and these are just a list of all the connections that I've made already and sometimes if you're facing an issue with one of the connections you can come here and verify it might ask you to enter your credentials again and then fix the issue yeah so just a list and you can always come here and verify or if you want to delete a connection you can do that as well and then yeah so we don't have to go through the other ones here because they will come up as we start building some automations but for now what I would like to do is go back to the scenarios Tab and actually create a new scenario and here also you can filter by active or inactive scenario and then you can organize your scenarios into different folders so I'm going to click on the demos folder and to create a new scenario all I have to do is click on the plus create a new scenario button here up top so let's go ahead and do that and there we go our canvas is ready this is where we are going to be building our automations so what all is going on here first of all I would like to point out it's a pretty flexible canvas and that's one of the reasons I like I like make it's if you have used a tool like figma or sketch or any other flowchart tool it's pretty similar it's an infinite canvas you can zoom in and zoom out and you can drag things around so that's the first part the other part is all the options that we have here at bottom so by default every new scenario that you create is a scheduled has a schedule trigger so for example you see here it runs every 15 minutes obviously this one is turned off right now but once it's turned on it will run every 15 minutes so that's an example of a scheduled workflow but as you change things as you add applications and triggers here this might reflect the latest settings based on your workflow and you could also change the settings by clicking on it so that's the sort of to identify how and when your workflow is actually running next we have the save button just to save any changes we have a settings button where it asks you also a bunch of questions about whether your data is confidential whether you want to store the data about incomplete executions and so on and so forth and these all will make sense as you build new workflows and certain requirements come up okay so I'll come back to the rest of them here in a second but first let's go ahead and add a few things to the workflow and to add you just click on the plus icon here and typically in a workflow the first thing you add is a trigger Because unless there's a trigger there can be an action so for the trigger what I'll use is maybe we can use a web hook and I'll create a web hook here and so what happens is whenever you add a new application or a new trigger here then it asks you to fill a form to tell me how are you going to use this particular application and since it's a web hook it's asking me which web hook you want to use as you can see there's a list of all the web hooks that I've already created but I'm going to go ahead and create a new one as if I did not have one and then it asks you what you want to name this web hook so I'll just say dummy web hook and save and then it gives me a URL and this is a URL that is going to be invoked if you want to trigger this workflow so I hit okay and as you see now my scheduling settings have changed to reflect the latest trigger which is a web hook and web Hook by definition is supposed to be immediate because it's an ond demand trigger so this setting has changed to reflect my latest settings in the workflow okay perfect and then what you do is then when you have your trigger in place then you need an action and to add an action you just click on the plus icon and then this could be any app that you want to use in the workflow so for example I want to maybe send an email so I can look for Gmail and then it say what do you want to do I'll say send an email and they'll ask me to set up the account and go and fill out some details but we'll get into that as we build our projects uh for now I'll just hit okay it's not letting me save because it's saying these fields are mandatory that's okay because we will actually spend a lot of time in this editor so all of this will become clear but for now I just wanted to show you how this looks the next thing I want to show you is that you can drag these things around to match whatever setup you have in mind and if you notice there's a wrench icon here between the between the two applications on the path and if you click on that you get a bunch of options which are specific to this particular connection so you can do things like unlink basically break this connection add a router you can add a module we'll also talk about this in the later videos and then you could also add a note about this particular connection if you want to just write something to remember what this connection was all about so you can do that as well and then finally I wanted to remind you of the types of triggers that are generally available to us when implementing an automation workflow so here on the screen as you can see I've laid out the three types of triggers uh we talked briefly about them in a previous lesson but let me give you a quick recap so there's the on demand triggers there's the schedule triggers and there's the app event based triggers so on demand triggers are essentially when we want a workflow to run and run on demand is self-explanatory scheduled is when we create a workflow and then set a time on it for it to run on a given frequency and then the final one is the app event which is essentially a trigger which starts a workflow based on an event that takes place within an app so for our first project we will be focusing on the app events based trigger and let me introduce you to the scenario that we are going to be automating so let me move over to the right here okay so here's the scenario or workflow it's the same thing so what I want to do or what I want to automate rather in this in this scenario is whenever a whenever I get invited to a to an event and I receive that event in my calendar and we'll be using Google calendar for this demo I want to create a task in my to-do application and I use todoist so essentially anytime I get invited to an event and I receive the notification in Google Calendar I want to create a corresponding task in my to-do application which is cist and for the to-do itself what I want is the what I want to automate is the adding of the description for the task and also when the task is due date so essentially what I'm trying to automate is that anytime there's a meeting that I'm invited to I want to make sure that I have it in my to-do list to prepare ahead of time for the meeting and the due date is essentially going to be the time of the meeting so that's first very basic Automation and then we are going to build upon it and we are going to add some categorization of the task as well so in this next step what we will do is so in the first one we just creating a task but in the next step we also want to ident identify if the meeting description matches a certain criteria and if it's and if it happens to be of a time oneon-one like a one-on-one meeting we want to also categorize a task into doist and apply a label on it that says one onone so that's the background and now we're going to flip over to the make editor and start building our first workflow let's go ahead and click on the make tab over here and I already have my Google Calendar as well as my todoist applications open as well because we will need them for the testing purposes okay so here I've organized my make Studio a little bit so I have created a folder called demos which is where I will be working for the most part for our videos and for this particular one I'm going to go ahead and click on create a new scenario because we're starting from scratch we're not using a template in this case so we'll just click on create a new scenario and that brings us to the canvas okay so we are ready to to implement and so whenever we Implement a workflow there's there are two things involved there is the trigger which is our calendar event here on the left and then there's actions so actions could be one or more in our case it's just only to be one action which is of creating a task in the to-do application but there could be one or more and that essentially the combination of them forms the workflow so first thing first we need to set up our trigger so how do we do that so let me switch back over here so since our trigger is of type app it's an app event we can just click on this plus icon because when you click on this plus icon what you get is a list of applications and that's exactly what we want because our trigger is just of type app so we look for the app that we want to use as the trigger so I'm literally just going to type here Google Calendar and and it shows me this option gu there only one Google calendar so I click on this and then whenever you select an app from the dropdown you get sort of everything that make can do with this particular application so up top you have all the events that this app supports so any of these could be used as a trigger or they have a bunch of actions that you can take in Google Calendar from make for example getting a calendar creating a calendar updating a calendar and so on and so forth but what we need for our scenario is literally to get notified Whenever there is a new event invite in in our calendar so for that over here there's an event called watch events and it's going to pretty much just watch four events to take place in Google Calendar and Google Calendar will then notify make that hey there was a new event that just came in so this is me notifying you and then you can do whatever you need to do so this is where when we click on this button and set up our Google Calendar with make we're essentially subscribing to events from Google Calendar so I'm going to go ahead and click on watch events and then you get this nice little popup with a bunch of settings and the first thing it usually asks is which calendar you want to use now I've already connected My Demo Gmail but if you haven't connected it yet you'll click on the add button and then you will go through the steps to essentially authenticate with your Google calendar and then make will store your information so that it can call Google Calendar or talk to Google Calendar on your behalf but since I've already connected my account we will skip that step and then you get a a bunch of questions here that what kind of events you're looking at which calendar you want me to be paying attention to do you want me to look at deleted events or not and if you want to query for a particular type of events and how many events you want me to process every time I get notified let's start from the top here and I just want to use my primary calendar because that's the only one only meaningful calendar in my Google calendar so I select that and then it says watch events I create a date update date starting date or ending date so we'll just because we want to process them as they created we'll just click on created date and what these mean you can read the documentation and it will tell you exactly which one to use in which scenario and there will be bunch of these situations in any different apps that you use so the best place to understand which one to select is looking at the make documentation but for now we'll use the created date I don't care about deleted events for now no query and then how many events I'm expecting to process per per cycle I'm just going to change it to one because I don't have that much activity going on in my calendar if I was receiving multiple invites per minute or per 15 minutes I would be increasing the limit but for now we can just go with one because I'll just be creating one event to test this workflow okay so click okay and there we go so our Google Calendar has been set up as a trigger so this part of the automation is done and now what's left is creating an action that should take place whenever make is notified of a new event in my Google Calendar okay so let's click on plus here so essentially what we're trying to do is we're trying to make this connection and we click on plus and this is where we start creating our actions and our action is going to be the todoist something that we want to do in the to to-do application so I'm going to go ahead and search for to-do click on that and then same thing a nice popup shows up and it's asking me what action do you want to take whenever this workflow is running what do you want me to do and my action is pretty straightforward but you can see all the options that you have here it's pretty incredible everything that you can do but for now we're just going to click on create a task and then same thing it's going to ask me what kind of task what do you want to call it and all the information that Tod doist expects whenever a new task is getting created so now you might be wondering we need this information we need the task description we need the due date in todoist we need to provide this information to to do to todoist but how does it get there so that's sort of this editor that me has provided helps because by making this connection everything that Google Calendar has sent to make will be available for us to use on the to-do side so when I click on content which is essentially the the name of my task into doist World it shows me everything that it received from Google Calendar all these things came in from a Google Calendar event so I can look for description and that's essentially the description of my Google calendar event or I think there's another one called summary there we go so there's a summary as well so we can play around with them but for now I'm just going to use the use the summary and when I click on this I can literally just drag it in the content space here and that will take whatever text it received from Google Calendar and provide that to doist so that's a summary but we can also add our own text to it so since we're creating a task based on an event I will say prepare for and then whatever the name of the event is in Google Calendar it'll say prepare for so and then I'll add meeting at the end on my behalf so the summary you can think of it as a variable that is coming and the value will be provided by Google Calendar okay so that's the name of the task for project we'll just select inbox because we will be sending all the tasks to the too inbox this is to do a speak so we don't have to worry too much about the details but we'll just say all the Tas should go to our inbox we'll leave the labels alone for now we'll come back to it in a second and then the the other piece of information that we needed is a due date so again I want the due date to be when before my meeting or at the time of my meeting because I don't want to be reminded of this task after the meeting is already done so the due date is just going to be whenever my meeting is going to begin so I can look for based on a date I can look for the start time and this is again coming from uh coming from Google Calendar there should also be other types of dates here we have the original start time let's take a look okay that's that should be fine for now so we'll just take the the original start time and drag it to the date section here into doist and then we'll also change this to date and time because I want inou the due date and time to be exactly the time of my meeting and then it says a human readable representation of the due date I'm going to use the same thing and we might have to change it when we run it because this information gets updated when the actual events take place this is what make NOS of Google Calendar app right now but when Google Calendar sends real information sometime this information changes based on how Google Calendar has changed or decided to change the information it is sending but for now we'll stick to whatever is provided to us so we'll say Original start time here and then oops and then it's asking me is it a recurring event I'll just leave that as is yeah so that's it for now so we'll click on okay and so we have pretty much created our first workflow which is we have the trigger here on the left which is our Google Calendar and then we have the action here on the which is creating a task into to do it TST so the only thing that's left to do now is to test it so before we actually turn this workflow on it's typically advised to test it because once you turn it on then the floodgates are open and anytime when new comes in you'll start creating tasks but we're not ready to do that yet we don't know if our configuration is successful and it's what we are expecting so before we go ahead and turn on the workflow which is pretty much when the flood gets open and anytime a new Google Calendar event is created a task will be created it is a good idea to test the workflow and to do that what we need to do is go to Google calendar and create a test event so I'm going to create a test event here and call it let's say standup so I'll just call this meeting stand up 12:00 p.m. to 15 minutes is enough and I will save okay so now the meeting is on my calendar so now I want to test had this workflow been running will I get an event or will I get a task created in my to-do application for this particular event so to do that I'm just going to click on run once and it's it will just look at Google Calendar for a few minutes and see if there's any new events pull them in and then process let's click on play and that is going to so it seems like it went through as you can see Google Calendar is in green so let's go over to todoist and see what we got and voila so we got the we got a task created called prepare for Santa meeting and that's see if we any other information in it so the project seems to be correct that is Inbox but notice that we did not get a due date and that's okay and usually when you prepare a workflow like this there could be some misconfiguration and then that's a whole idea of testing so we go back and then address why we did not get our due date so let's go back to make and click on to-do list so if you remember we had added an original start time for both the date and the human readable representation of due date but I that this might not be the right configuration because I've seen this happen before because sometimes Google Calendar will change how it sends the information to make so let's click on this again and see what all came in from Google Calendar and this time we actually see the real data so it's a little bit easier to work with and if you notice that I have I got a created time I got an updated time but this is when the event was created what I'm after is when the event starts so I can just take instead of the original start time I can just take the start variable and then work with that and then I'm going to use the same for the human readable representation as well because this to me at least is human readable sometimes there's a time stamp that is more numeric and and not human readable so let's click on okay so let's click on okay and and then now let's create another event and this time I'll say retro perspective from 1 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. save and I'm going to run it again so seems like it went through both of the apps are in green the Google Calendar as well as todoist and this one over here shows me like how many events were processed and how many actions were taken so let's go ahead and move back to doist and see what we got there so seems like I got the task created called prepare for retrospective meeting and this time I also got the due date successfully with it which is at 1 p.m. today so let's go back to the Myro board and see what else we had discussed so this part is complete we got the event we got the task we got the description as well as a due date and the next thing we have talked about is the the categorization of the task so what I want to do is anytime a Google Calendar event comes in with one on one in its description I wanted to create a task into to do this with the label one-onone and for that what I'll have to do is I'll have to introduce some kind of a filtering mechanism here as I've shown in the diagram here so that we can test if the description does contain the tag oneon-one in it if so then add the label otherwise just create a regular task so how do we do that so we need to add this little piece here in the middle and in make it's called a router since I'm adding something in the middle here what I'll do is I right click here and it'll give me a few options as to what is it that I'm looking to do I can either add a filter I can unlink the two modules or I can add a module and finally I can also add a router because that is what we need to decide which way we want to go so I'll add a router and there we go so we get this this router here in the middle and by the way you can drag these things around as much as you want it doesn't matter because there's this tiny little button here called Auto align which then brings everything back together and and you can zoom in and zoom out as well so let's create some space here okay perfect so what I want to do in the router Is So currently it doesn't make any sense because it's just going linearly like this everything that will go through the router will go eventually to the same to do his task so we need to add a route and you do that by clicking on the plus icon here so now it is starting to look like what we discuss here which is we have two two types of actions one is a regular create task and one is a create task with category okay how do we how do we decide what is going on here versus what is going on there okay so first of all let's go ahead and add todoist to this second one as well and same thing create a task and everything else here is also going to be similar for Content we'll take the summary and add bear for meeting and for the and in this one for the label we will also use the one-onone label because we will only go into this route when whenever it matches a certain criteria which we will add in a second and then same thing for data and time we'll use the start variable and then here as well okay I go to the back click on okay so now we have our task created with with one-onone and everything else is exactly the same okay so how do we decide what goes here what goes here so we'll use this tiny little button here to add a filter and essentially we'll say you only go here when you match a certain certain criteria so click on set up a filter and the filter is essentially we are looking for the description we going to read the description and say if the Des description contains if the description contains the word oneon-one which is like one colon one because typically when I get one meetings and this could be different for you but typically when I get one-onone meetings they have the word oneon-one in it so I'm just going to look for that if they do then then it will go go here and create the create the meeting with the one-on-one label as we have selected here but in this case it will go if it we only want it to go here if it doesn't contain the tag one-onone in it so what we'll do is we'll say set up a filter and we will say yes to the fallback route so what it says it will be used in the case where bundle cannot continue on from the router via any other route so this is the fallback route meaning if it could not go here it will go here so by default it will always try to go here but if this filter fails then it will use the use this route and we can just name it fall back and this one we can name as the one-on-one route okay just to repeat fallback is only used when the other route could not go through so it's like a if else if one-onone go here else go here okay very good so it's time to test this so let's go ahead and I'm going to delete these events just to avoid any confusion and then also let's delete these tasks as well okay and now I'm going to create a oneon-one meeting so I'll say sahill Joe oneon-one save so that one-on-one meeting is created and the description has one-onone in it and when I'm running my workflow we will basically be testing if that is available in it as well okay so time to test it the event is already created so let's go ahead and test this setup as always I'm just going to click on the play button here and okay seems like it went through the route that I was expecting it to go through the one-on-one route let's switch over to do and see what we got there and and look at that we got a task created I did not add anything to the description so it just says Sal one-onone and it says due date is 12:00 p.m. but so that so our route is working as expected let's make sure sure we fix the description as well we'll just say prepare for meeting and this will just get added in okay so that's pretty good so let's go back and check out our our scenario seems like we got everything we need we got the trigger we got regular create task and we got the and we got the categorized task uh I guess what we haven't tested is the back route so we can do that now let me delete this one and I'll just add a regular event and we'll just click on Save and Go back to make and run it once again okay so this one did go through on this side but seems to doist had an error I'm not sure what's going on with your API right now but essentially would have gone to the fallback route as expected and we can see the the event details here okay perfect this is pretty much good to go we just need to name this so we'll just click here and say Google Calendar to todoist since those are the apps that are being used here and that way it's easy to identify whenever I come across this workflow anywhere okay so that's pretty much it and what we can do now is yeah close out this section and then in the next section we will work on our second project so I'll see you there

Channel: Sahil Khosla

Views: 3,951

Keywords: integromat tutorial, integromat make, zapier tutorial, zapier automation, make integromat, make.com tutorial, make.com, webhook tutorial

Id: lKkGewKvXdo

Length: 30min 59sec (1859 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024