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Hi! I’m Deb, one of the managing editors of the Zapier blog. We’re starting to think about 2021 planning over here, and that means we have all the ideas. It’s awesome because we get to think up pie-in-the-sky plans and figure out how to turn them into actionable projects. But, of course, it’s impossible to do everything we want to do—and that’s where we need to flex our “no” muscles.At Zapier, we always try to build the robot to help us get better at our jobs, and saying no is a big part of doing good work. So we use automation to help us say no, whether it’s to a coworker who needs help, to our manager, to a meeting—or to ourselves.Here’s a blog post I wrote about how we do it.Use this tech trick to help you say noWith that said, what do you think we should do with the Zapier blog in 2021? Are there apps you want us to write about? Zap workflows you want tutorials for? Roles you want to see some automation inspiration about? Drop any thoughts in the comments! 

Hey Community, Krystina here from the Zapier blog! I know our community members build pretty complex workflows to solve work problems. But does your workflow trump SheEO’s 82-step Zap?That’s not a typo. SheEO is building a $1 billion fund to support women-run businesses, so they need to automate whenever possible to reduce errors. Check out how they do it, and use their visualization of their monster Zap to inspire you to push the limits of what’s possible in Zapier! How SheEO uses automation to support women-run businesses 

We recently had a community member who presented us with a bit of a tricky issue:I would like to have weekly zapier rollups created using the information in this view but ONLY for items which are currently in the view – NOT for items which may have passed into and then out of the airtable view sometime over the course of the week. So, in other words, they’d like to get a digest of items that are in a particular Airtable view at the time of rolling up those digest items to send.This one stumped me at first because we’re not able to remove items that have been added to a digest. So triggering on a record being added to a view won’t help us because once it’s in the digest, it’s there permanently, regardless of whether it has since left that view in Airtable.My next thought was to use Storage by Zapier, adding child values for each record, then removing the value when that record entered another view (that would, by definition, mean it had exited the other view). This didn’t work out becau

Hi Zapier community! I’m Deb, one of the managing editors of the Zapier blog. We recently chatted with someone who attributes her career in tech to Neopets, Tumblr, and Zapier. A motley crew of apps, for sure. Here’s the fascinating (and vaguely unbelievable) story.How tinkering with Neopets and Zapier led to a career in techIf you work in tech (or even with tech, which most everyone here does), how did you get to where you are? What weird path led you to your role? And how has Zapier influenced your journey?Let us know in the comments or respond to our staff writer Justin on Twitter.  

Hey there! Janine, here, one of the managing editors of the Zapier blog, with a recent piece we published about some of the ways you can use Zapier to help you keep track of the leads coming in to your business. You can set up a Zap to send names, contact info, and other details into your CRM or a spreadsheet, without you having to copy and paste.In 3 ways to automatically keep track of your leads we offer examples and advice for how to:Track leads that come in through email Track leads you get from forms Track leads you get from advertising campaignsIs there a way you use Zapier to help with lead tracking? Reply and let us know! 

Hey Community!Krystina here from the Zapier Blog. Many of us have at least one Google Sheet where there’s hundreds of rows of detailed information, but you may only need notifications for changes to specific columns. (Yes, the blog team has one and I try to avoid it when I can.) Or, you need to send emails using specific information from that gargantuan spreadsheet. I know we have a ton of Google Sheets power users in the house, so you may appreciate this latest tutorial from the blog on how to send an email from updates to specific Google Sheets rows.  There’s also a workaround to get your Zap to trigger when you change a cell between two values often. Give it a try! How to send an email when updates are made to Google Sheets rows

Hi! Deb here from the Zapier blog with some thoughts on two apps that, until recently, very much confused me: Google Drive and Google Photos. Why are there two apps that do the same thing? Answer: there aren’t. They’re very different. I know this because I asked our staff writer Justin to write about them. Google Drive vs. Google Photos: What’s the difference?What I found super helpful about his explanation was that Google Drive is best for professional use and Google Photos is best for personal use. There’s more nuance than that, of course, but it was a helpful first step to figure out what should go where.Because Google Drive integrates with Zapier, it ends up extending its professional benefits too, making hs argument even stronger. For example, if you have a designer who emails you assets, Zapier can automatically upload them to Drive. Or you can automatically save all your business’s Instagram posts to Google Drive so you have them backed up. Which do you use? Google Drive or Goog

We have all sorts of diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts going on at Zapier. Everything from unconscious bias training to allyship keynote speakers to KRs that reflect our D&I goals.Since we spend all our days thinking about how we can make apps work best for us, my colleague Dannielle thought about how folks could use Slack to help promote inclusive language. These days, most of us are living on Slack or another team chat app, so it’s a great opportunity to take advantage of its features to add to D&I efforts.Take a look at this article she wrote for details on how it works—and why.Promote inclusive language on your team with a simple SlackbotNow we’re on the hunt for other apps that have features that might help with D&I efforts. Any suggestions? Drop them in the comments so we can check them out! 

Hey, Community! It’s Janine, one of the managing editors here at the Zapier blog. Airtable is a popular app on Zapier, and one that gets asked about fairly regularly here in the Community. We recently published a piece that goes through some of the ways people use Zapier to automate their Airtable bases. Get some inspiration for workflows that let you:Track important information in Airtable, like importing contacts, form submissions, or information from emails or RSS feeds. Be notified when things change in your base, by getting emails, notifications in a team chat app, or a text message. Automatically back up your data by sending new information from Airtable to other spreadsheets, or vice versa.Do you have a favorite Airtable Zap, or would you like us to go into more detail on how to set up one of the Zap workflows in the article? Let us know!

I’m one of the Managing Editors of the blog over here at Zapier, and my colleague Krystina recently wrote a piece about how to automate your feedback tracking. Her system is based on a brag sheet, where she tracks all her wins—and not-so-wins. I just recently became a manager at Zapier, and this article made me realize: I need a system for tracking feedback and comments for my direct reports. And not just for performance reviews, but for 1:1s, growth plans, and even just celebrating daily wins. I can only help my directs grow if I can point to really specific successes and areas for growth.At Zapier, most of our communication happens in Slack, but we work in lots of other spots: Google Docs, Coda, our internal blog tool Async, and plenty of other apps. Instead of making a Zap for each of those, I decided to use Push by Zapier.Whenever anything happens that I want to track, I use the Chrome extension to jot it down. (I also have the Push by Zapier app on Slack, which will automatically

Hey, Community! Janine from the blog team here with another collection of tips you can use to grow your business. This article looks at marketing automation, and ways you can use Zapier to keep things focused and on track. This article includes Zap workflows you can use to:Stay on top of new leads from Facebook Lead Ads or Google Ads Use form submissions to automatically build your email lists Connect social media accounts so you can easily cross-post or automatically push new posts on your site to your most important social platforms Keep attendees of your live and virtual events up-to-date on your businessCheck it out! 4 ways to use marketing automation to grow your business

Hi Community! Krystina here from the Zapier blog team!I don’t know about y’all, but when I think of organizing my files on my computer, Google Drive, or other places, I think, “hmmm, I really should do that...but you know what sounds fun? ANYTHING ELSE.”If your cloud storage is a hot mess like mine, you might appreciate our most recent article, rounding up 3 easy ways to keep your Dropbox organized.  If you’re always digging through your email for a file attachment, or you forget to backup your files until something catastrophic happens, you’ll really want to take some of these Zap workflows for a spin. (And of course, you can sub Dropbox for your favorite cloud storage app.)While you’re getting your files in order, you might as well play around with the new Zoom recording trigger and back up your video calls too.     3 ways to keep your Dropbox organized

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, as my human interaction is at a minimum (to put it lightly): small talk is hard. Even more so when you’re working remotely—my colleague Jusin wrote an entire article about it.The hardest part for me is wanting to help keep morale up for my team but feeling super awkward being like, “hey everyone, let’s talk about...uh, something!” One thing we do at Zapier is let robots do the awkward parts for us. For example, every Friday, a bot sends our #marketing Slack channel a message with a Friday “watercooler” question. That gets everyone chatting without anyone having to awkwardly ask people what they wanted to be when they grew up. Much less weird coming from a robot, we think.If you’re itching for human interaction but don’t want to be the person who starts randomly asking about international weather patterns, try some of the automation suggestions I outlined in this article.Build culture in your remote team with automationWhat did we miss?

Hey, all!Like many working parents, I'm preparing for a school year that includes an awful lot of remote learning. Last year, I used Zapier to help us stay on top of school work with as little nagging as possible, so that it was easier for me, my husband, and our children to know what was done and what needed to happen next. I put together this article in March collecting Zap workflows that I and other parents at Zapier used to help keep their family schedules moving a bit more smoothly. 3 ways to automate parenting duties without screen timeMy most-used parenting Zap isn't in the article, though: I developed a routine of going through my children's Google Classroom accounts a few times a week (usually very early, before anyone else was awake) and copying assignments into a Google Sheet that had separate tabs for each child. Everything I put in the sheet was automatically routed to Todoist with due dates, so when they sat down for learning time, there was an easy-to-use list of what ne

Hi! I’m Deb, one of the Zapier blog editors. I’m just coming off more than 48 hours without power from the hurricane, and my inbox is beyond full. I’m an inbox zero person, so it’s...overwhelming.But I’ve thought a lot about how to manage my emails. First, I make sure I spend no more than five minutes on any given email. It’s mostly about the mindset, but using things like canned responses and text expanders also helps. I also automate my inbox with filters. One trick I started using recently relies on a Zap: I star any email that requires more than a quick response, and it turns it into a task on my to-do list. That lets me archive the email, get to inbox zero more quickly, but still be sure to respond later. Here’s an article I wrote on our blog explaining it a bit more.Why you should respond to emails—and how to make yourself do itWe also just released a Gmail add-on that lets you do stuff like this on a one-off basis. Check it out.Do you have any tricks for automating your inbox? L

If you’re one of the 2 billion people that use Google’s productivity suite, G Suite, then chances are you’re probably looking to be more productive, save more time, reduce stress, and otherwise maximize your usage of the products. Luckily, the Zapier blog has got you covered! Google Suite is comprised of Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. Below you’ll find links to blog posts about each of those. And if you make it to the bottom of this article you’ll find a little bonus :) 4 time-saving Gmail settings you didn't know you needed Deb Tennen, Denior Editor at Zapier, offers four quick Gmail tweaks you can make that will help you to shave off a few clicks here and there. Who doesn’t love tips about how to better use email? In this blog post, she outlines how to: Send and archive with one click Default to reply all Enable the reading pane Use templates to create auto-replies Check out the full post on the Zapier blog.   How to create Google Docs templates based on form respon

The ProblemSometimes data in your trigger will cause an action to fail. For example, maybe an email address was typed as jane.doherty@gmail@com and the action step says “uh, uh...that’s not right” and the action doesn’t run.You can’t replay anything because we’ll always use the same trigger data. But who wants to do all of that data entry manually, especially a form with lots of fields being mapped to something like Salesforce? That’s why you’re using Zapier in the first place — to automate it!The WorkaroundsThis won’t always be possible, depending on the timing and whether the app supports it, but here are some things you can try:1. Replay the trigger step in the Zap editor and run a test on the action step(s)Assuming the problematic trigger entry is one of the most recent ones to have run (a good reason to keep an eye on the error emails we send), you can go into the Zap editor, re-test the trigger, and then on your action step you fix the faulty data.It’s a manual way to replay some

Hey, folks!Janine here, from the Zapier blog team, ready to share another idea on how you can use automation. This one—on using automation to curate the perfect playlist—is about improving your workday by getting you the right tunes to work by.Tyler Robertson, one of our customer champions, wrote up this walk-through on how he uses Spotify’s audio features to automatically curate his perfect work playlist. it’s a fairly advanced Zap that uses a filter step that you customize so that songs that match your preferences flow into the playlist you specify.He’s also included a lot of great information about Spotify’s audio features and how they’re set up. Check it out!Make your perfect Spotify playlist with this automated workflow   

Lina Koh, Senior Content Designer, shares her best tip for working from homeYou can check out the Instagram post as well if you’d like to join the conversation there!

Hi there! Tim here from the Zapier Support Team with a workflow idea.Background InfoHave you ever had a Zap where you’d search for a value from a Trigger in another app, like a Google Sheet, with a Find Step but if the value isn’t found, the whole Zap is ‘Safely halted’ because the next Steps in the Zap workflows depend on the search? Have you wanted to continue the Zap with default value(s) but found that using a Formatter Text Default Value Step also gets halted due to a dependancy on the Find Step that didn’t return anything?If so, you’re not alone! Read on for a few ways around this. 1) Use Find or Create instead of just FindThis won’t always be an option, but some apps include the ability to create a record if one isn’t found. If your app has the option to Create a Record if one isn’t found by the search, and you don’t mind having entries with default values added to your data, then:Turn on the “Create Record if not found” checkbox Fill out the fields with default values that you’

Hi y’all! I’m Krystina, a content writer for the Zapier blog. I write about automation tips and tricks using our product. I know we’ve got quite a few Google Sheets power users in the house, so I wanted to share some helpful in-app functions you can use to save yourself a Zap step.  I must confess, I am bad at formulas, so anytime I can use something like Formatter to handle something in a spreadsheet, I’ll go for it. However, if you’re trying to be economical with your tasks, or just want to simplify a complex Zap a little, my colleague Justin wrote about six functions that already exist in Google Sheets. From fixing capitalization errors to fetching data from other Google Sheets, check out these handy functions:  6 Google Sheets functions that do more than math