Recently, the TUAW staff talked about their workflow, and the tools they use to keep their day moving smoothly. One detail that didn’t come out in my contribution is my growing usage of automation tools to help me get things done.
I’m an avid IFTTT user, using the web service to send tasks to my children’s iPad or mood updates to my Jawbone UP. Recently, though, I found myself needing to do a complex task that fell outside the capability of IFTT. That’s when I discovered Zapier, a web automation service very similar to IFTTT.
Zapier is an online tool that taps into the APIs of over 200 different web services. It includes major services like Evernote and Dropbox as well as niche ones like Campfire, Freshbooks and Github. You can create a “zap” that pulls data from one service and then performs a task based on that data. These zaps run automatically every 15 minutes and can be turned on or off as needed.
In my case, I needed a way to take the contents of an email in Gmail and send it to a shared Google spreadsheet. For a while, I tried copy and paste to move the subject, body and other details into my Google spreadsheet, but that task was extremely tedious and time consuming. I looked to Google to see if it had some built-in tools that would let me easily send data between the two services, but I found none. It was only after hours of searching through other email task management solutions that I stumbled upon Zapier.
Zapier supports the major Google services, which means it can plumb data from Gmail and then send it to Google Docs. The granularity of control available to you in Zapier is fantastic. I was able to set up a “zap” that would scan my Gmail account for emails with the label “app review” and then add those emails as new rows to a Google spreadsheet. I could pick the time stamp as column one in the spreadsheet row, the subject as column two and the body as column three. All I have to do now is label an email and wait for my zap to run. It is such an elegant and easy solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for weeks.
This only scratches the surface of what you can do with Zapier. Zapier is available for you to try for free for 14 days. Once your trial is over, you can choose a free plan, which provides you with 5 zaps that perform a task every 15 minutes. You get up to 100 tasks per month for free. You can purchase additional zaps and tasks starting at US$15 per month for the basic plan which includes 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks. If you want zaps to run faster than every 15 minutes, you can purchase a business plan for $49/month. This plan gives you 15,000 tasks and 50 zaps that run every 5 minutes.
Friday Favorite: Using Zapier to automate my workflow originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 19 Jul 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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