Automate Your Life in 4 hours – Agent and Automation Zapier Course

Welcome to a comprehensive guide on transforming your productivity through the power of automation. In this course, Estephania from Free Code Camp will teach you how to connect your everyday applications using Zapier, all without needing to write a single line of code. You'll progress from the basic building blocks of Zaps to advanced features like AI Copilot, Zapier Tables, and custom AI agents. Through hands-on examples, you'll learn to automate repetitive tasks such as syncing Google Drive files to Sheets or managing GitHub issues. And thanks to Zapier for providing a grant to make this course possible.

Do you want to end your workday feeling truly accomplished? Have you ever wished that those small repetitive tasks could be completed automatically so you can focus on the really important tasks? There is one way to do this and that is called automation. In this course, you're going to learn how to automate your workflows with Zapier. No coding required. With Zapier, you can connect and share information between the applications that you use every day, including some of the most popular ones. You can get started with a free account. That's what we will be doing during the course, and I'll walk you through the process and the tools step by step. I'm Estania, software developer and instructor at Free Code Camp. We'll start with the basic concepts that you need to know. Then we'll create a Sapier account and we'll start diving into SAPS, the core building blocks of Zapier. After this, we'll check out the AI copilot and how it can help us to create those automated workflows, Zapier tables, and Zapier forms that you can use in your automations. Then you'll learn how to set up AI agents for automating tasks that involve deeper reasoning, such as assigning labels to emails based on their content. We'll set up custom chat bots, create diagrams to visualize our workflows, and finally, we'll set up our very own MCP server to share information from our applications with an AI client of our choice, an artificial intelligence client. We'll create several automations like transferring file information from Google Drive to Google Sheets, sending a message on Google Chat every Monday morning, and receiving chat notifications when a new GitHub issue is opened. We'll also set up a workflow where the information will be automatically added to a Zapier table and then we will have a button to approve applications. This will write a custom draft email on our Gmail that we can customize and send. Finally, we'll set up an AI agent for labeling unread emails based on their content and a chatbot for brainstorming video ideas. We'll finish the course by creating an MCP server, a model context protocol server that will connect our AI client, Visual Studio Code, and Gemini CLI in our examples to Google Calendar and GitHub so we can exchange information between these applications. So, are you ready? I'm excited to start this journey with you through the world of automation. Let's begin.

Before we actually start the course, please take a moment to think about this. If you could automate something about your workflow, anything at all, what would that be? Take like 3 to 5 minutes to think about this and identify some things about your workflow that you would like to automate. That will be your goal after you complete the course. So, take a moment and then come back.

Imagine you're at a normal day at work. Sometimes those small repetitive tasks can add up and consume most of your time, right? When you'd rather be doing something more productive. With automation, you can transform an unproductive or let's say a suboptimal workday into a workday where you actually complete all your tasks and your goals. How does that sound? I'll give you a concrete example. Let's say that your daily work involves uploading files to Google Drive and then for some reason you need to pass or copy some of that information onto a spreadsheet. Those small tasks repeated multiple times a day can add up to a lot of time every day, right? With automation, you can use technology to do exactly the same but automatically. This way, you'll save yourself a lot of time and you'll be able to focus on the most important tasks in your daily work. That is the power of analyzing your current workflow and determining what can be automated.

Sappir basically thinks like this. This is what happens behind the scenes when you configure an automated workflow in Zapier. If this happens, do this. It sounds quite simple, right? But you'll see that it is very powerful in the world of Zapier. This first part, "if this happens," is called the trigger. When the trigger happens in a specific app that you're going to choose yourself when you create that workflow, this second part is going to be triggered. And this is called the action. It's what you actually want to execute, what you want to automate when the trigger occurs. We'll dive a lot more into the specific terminology and the details during the course. So, if you're ready, let's continue to create your Sapier account. I will see you there.

Great. So, let's get started creating your Sapier account. First, you need to go to sapier.com. Over here, you write sapiier.com and you'll reach this landing page. This may be a bit different depending on when you're taking the course. You can see that there is an option to start for free with your email or you can also start free with Google. I'm going to click here at the top right, sign up. So after I click on that, I see that I need to enter my work email, my first name, and my last name. And this is how we can get started for free. You can also choose sign up with Google. I already have my Zapier account created, but you should follow the instructions. It would be very simple just signing up. Maybe you'll need to verify some things in your email before you get started. To log into your account, you just go back to sapier.com and then you click here in the top right, login. You will need to enter your email or you can continue with Google, Facebook, Microsoft or with SSO.

Awesome. So now let's cover the core concepts that you need to know to get started with Zapier. I promise that this will be quick so we can go back to applying all of this in Zapier, but I think it's important that you have this theoretical foundation first that you can build on. First of all, we have the term automation. We already saw this one, so I'll go through it quickly. It's basically using technology to do what you need to do so you don't have to do it yourself manually. And this way you can save yourself some time. And what are you going to be automating? Well, you're going to be automating workflows. Let's check out what a workflow is. A workflow is a repeatable sequence of steps that you follow to go from starting a process to completing it from start to end. The key here is that it's repetitive. For example, let's say that you want to write an article about something. You would first brainstorm ideas, then you would write uh your draft or start writing, then you would proofread it, and finally you would publish it. You would do this, follow this process every single time you write an article. So this is an example of a workflow, a repeatable sequence of steps that you follow exactly the same way every time you do something. In the world of Zapier, a workflow is represented by a SAP. A SAP is a workflow that connects your apps to automate repetitive tasks. The key here is that it's a workflow. So, it is a repeatable sequence of steps that are going to happen automatically when the trigger happens. Remember that is app is made of two components, a trigger and an action. The trigger is an event within the app that starts ASUP. So basically, if you want to automate a process that starts in Google Drive, let's say that you upload a file to Google Drive, that upload process and having that new file added to your Google Drive would be the event, the trigger that starts the SAP related to that connection. That is the trigger and you can customize the trigger based on your needs. For example, if a new row is added to a spreadsheet, you may want to do something with the data of that new row automatically. Well, that's where you can customize what happens when the new row is added. But just the event of adding that new row will trigger the entire automated process. And that is the trigger. You can customize and choose the trigger. and we'll see how you can do that directly on Zapier to fit your needs because every workflow is different. Now the second component of ASAP is the action. The action is an operation that can be performed against a third party API either a read or a write. This is a more technical concept that I took from the Zapier official Zapier documentation, but think you can think of it as basically an operation that you're going to perform during your workflow and that operation will be connected in some way with the apps that you chose for your workflow. Basically, an action is an operation. For example, to give you some concrete examples, h an action could be sending a chat message. It could be sending an email, could be creating a document, adding a calendar event, or updating a spreadsheet. These are just some examples, but there are thousands of actions that you can choose from. This really depends on the apps that you're connecting for your workflow.

Great. So now that you know these four main concepts, workflow, SAP, trigger, and action, let's talk about tasks, which are very closely related to SAPs. A task is any successful action that a SAP performs. Focus on the word successful here. This is key. Successful actions. When a stop triggers an action, the action associated to that trigger can be either successful if it ran without any issues, everything was completed as intended. However, this could also be unsuccessful. If there is an error at some point during the execution of the action, you can also set up some custom error handling directly on Zapier. But when the action is successful, that is called a task. And why is that important? Well, because tasks count towards your monthly usage limit, which you do have depending on your Sapier account, your current plan. Uh so you should know how these tasks are counted so you can stay within the limits or determine the best account for you based on your usage. You can find more details about task usage in the official Zapier documentation. Here you can see a screenshot with more details, but this is just as a reference and this may change in the future. So I would highly suggest checking their official references and documentation right now. Uh but here if you want to pause the video and read this for a moment, you can find more details about task usage. Currently we are with the free account. We're going to create simple workflows, two-step workflows. So we will have a trigger and one action. But if you want to start creating more complex workflows, that is when task usage becomes more complex and this can be helpful.

And with all of that, thanks for paying attention to the slides. Now, we're going to go back to the practice. And this was some theory that we had to go through before we dive into the practice again because I think it's important that you have a solid foundation before we start. Are you ready? Let's dive in.

Great work so far and welcome to the world of automation because now you have your subure account. So we can start exploring the different options that we have here and the different features. Let's get started with this tool over here that we can see at the very center at the top. Let me zoom in. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see this better. You will see this at the default zoom which is a bit smaller but just to make it easier for you to see the options and if you're taking the course on mobile. I'm going to be zooming in the user interface as needed because I think this can be helpful. So let's dive in. First we have this option. We say co-pilot. What would you like to automate? The co-pilot is an AI tool that Zapier includes. With the free plan, you have some certain daily limits, but you can use this tool. And we will see how you can use it. First, I'm going to show you how you can actually define the stops, the workflows, sort of like more manually, choosing the apps yourself and creating those connections. But later on, we're also going to cover how you can do that automatically with co-pilot using this AI tool. Then we see this recommended for you which is a section with you can think of this as templates for existing workflows like Zapier has analyzed the most common workflows that you might need to use in your daily work and they have created some uh templates with predefined steps and app connections that you might need to configure but you already have like all the steps defined there as a template. They can be helpful to get started quickly, but in our example, we're going to start from scratch. Then we see here at the top right, we see the help option. We see explore apps because these are the apps that we can connect to. And then here you can see my profile with my initials. If you click here, you will see the option to configure your account settings and log out. And then we go here to this sidebar. You might think that I'm going to start with this orange button, but since this is the most important option, I'm going to leave the best for last. So, let's go to home here for a moment. This will take you here. This is the home of the the main page. Then, we go to assets. Assets is where you will be able to find everything that you've created within Zapier like all your SAPs, your tables, forms, chat bots, canvases, and agents. This is where you can find all them and manage them. You can edit them. You can delete them. You can also organize them into folders. And once we have a few examples here, I'm going to show you how you can group them and organize them into folders and subfolders. And now we see app connections. This is where you will find all the apps that you've connected to. Right now, we haven't added any connections, but don't worry, we'll do that in just a moment. You can also add a connection from here. If you already know that you want to work with this app and you want to add the connection, you can do that or you can do that when you are creating the SAP. It's equivalent. We will do that while we are creating the SAP, which is the most common scenario. Then we see SAP history. SAP history is helpful to keep track of what your SAPs are doing because when SAPs are triggered, they will start consuming your tasks and that counts toward towards your monthly limit. So, it's helpful to keep track of what your stops are doing, when they run, and how the tasks are being used. And you can do all of that in the SAP history tab over here. And then you see additional options that you can experiment with. You're welcome to try this out. Then here at the bottom left you will find something that is super important to stay on track. You have the plan tasks. This depending on your plan will have a different number for the free account. Currently that is 100. You can see that the usage resets in 28 days. So you can run 100 tasks per month or per 28 days and then your usage will reset and you can use 100 tasks the next month. and so on depending on your plan.

Awesome. And like I said, I saved the best for last. Here we have the create button where you can actually create your apps, tables, forms, canvas, chat bots, and agents. These are basically the main elements that you can work with in Zapier. If you click on either one of them, you will go to the tool where you can start creating them and customizing them to fit your needs. That's what we will do. We will cover all of them in a specific section for each one of them during the course. So, I'm excited to get started. We'll get started with the most fundamental elements, which are the SAPs. Let's start creating some SAPS, shall we? SAPs are like the fundamental building blocks, the core of automation in Zapier. They are the automated workflows that you will create by describing what you want to do when something happens and what applications will be involved. You'll also need to grant the permissions so Sappear can take that information or modify the files or the data that is stored in those applications in some way. Let's create our SAP. If we click here on create and then on SAPs, we will be creating our first SAP. So let's click and see what we get.

Great. So now this is the SAP creation tool that you will see in Zapier. Let's go through the main elements of the user interface so you know what these tools are for and then we'll start actually creating the workflow, shall we? Okay. So first we see this copilot copilot at the very center and the top. You can use Copilot to describe your workflow and Copilot will take care of setting up the steps for you, but we will be doing that later on. Right now, I want to show you the more traditional way of doing that so you understand all the different elements and how to customize what Copilot will give you if you choose to use Copilot at some point. The first thing that I want you to notice here is that we have the same structure that we saw in the slides. We have the trigger and we have the action. With our free account, we will be able to create simple two-step workflows. So, we will have one trigger and one action. When something happens that starts the set, we will trigger one action. But what you learn during the course can be applied to more complex workflows as well. It's basically the same, just expanding the complexity. Awesome. So you see the structure and now at the top you will see that this sub is untitled. It's currently a draft because it's not published. First you create the sub and then you have to sort of like publish it to make it active and start running it when the event the trigger happens. So let's click here and you will see different options. You can rename your SAP which is helpful so you can stay organized and quickly identify what the SAP is for. You can also duplicate the app because sometimes it's helpful when you have a complex to duplicate it and then you can customize it for other purposes but you already have a foundation based on a similar SAP. You can also create a template from this app. Let's rename our SAP for a moment. We are going to take information from Google Drive. In this example, we're going to say when I upload a file to my Google Drive, I want to take some of that information and create a new row on a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. Of course, you can choose your own naming conventions and standards and how you organize your assigns. You can see that I after I renamed the sub, it was transferred to this, which is like the main folder. You will see your username or yeah, your your name over here. You can customize the zoom with the plus key, the minus key, and the backslash. Zoom to fit. This basically just makes it fit nicely. You can also zoom out. And you can click on the option as well if you don't want to use a keyboard shortcut or if you just want to click on this or you can also set a custom zoom by writing let's say 80%. This is helpful especially when you want to have a general overview of the workflow. Then if we go here to the left, you will see that we have many different options. Let's go through them one by one. First we see linked assets. Linked assets are all the assets referenced in this SAP. Because in the SAP you will have flexibility to customize your workflow any way you want to. So you can connect the SAP to a Sappier table if you need to store the information or the data in a table. If you need to create a form so users or team members can enter some information or send you feedback or input that can be linked to your SAP. So everything is connected. You will see them here if you do that. Recent subs you will see the recently accessed SAPs. You can also see the SAP details. The details of this SAP. For example, the folder. Move this up to another folder to help you organize. If you click here, you can search through your folders and if you have other subfolders, you will be able to move them over here. Then the time zone. The time zone is important because you can trigger actions at specific moments in time. For example, you can set up weekly triggers. You can set up daily triggers at specific times and dates. So that time zone will help zap year know when you actually want the zap to be triggered. So it is important that you set the time zone or the time zone will be set automatically. If you want to keep the default that is totally okay as well. Then we see notes. You can document subs and steps with SAP nodes. This is important for documentation in case you're working on a team and you want to describe the steps and the logic of the workflow or if you want to describe it for yourself as well. So you later on can remember what you were thinking about when you created this workflow. Then we see the change history. Here we can see that the sub was created this specific day and who created it. We can also refresh the fields in case we have some new activity. And then in SAP runs we can see the run history when this particular SAP has run all the activity within the SAP. Right now, it is mu so we don't have any activity and we can also test the SAP. This is only available when we actually configure the SAP and all the steps. We will test the SAP before we enable it. Then we see the status. We see errors, warnings and informations on the different steps. We don't have the steps configured yet. So that's why we see this in the status. Then in the bottom left, you can see this. This is copilot again to help you with your SAM. You can chat with the chatbot with Copilot to help you with the steps and setting up your workflow. Right now, we're going to do that manually, but it's good to know that it's here. And you also have more advanced tools over here at the bottom left.

Awesome. So now the time has finally come. We are going to set up the trigger and the action. Are you ready? For now, let's close copilot over here. And we're going to click on the trigger. Select the event that starts your SAP. I'm going to click on it. And I see here all the different options that I can choose from. What are we going to do here? Well, we're going to trigger this app when a new file is uploaded to my Google Drive. So, I'm going to choose Google Drive here. But we need to configure more details about this event because Sapier and the SAP specifically needs to know when we actually want to trigger this specific SAP. Just saying that we want to connect to Google Drive won't actually give all the information that the SAP needs. So we are going to choose an event, a trigger event. You can see that for each application there are many different trigger events and these are customized for that specific app. For Google Drive we see new file, new file in folder if we want to trigger when a new file is uploaded to a specific folder or created. We also see when we have a trigger when a new folder is added to a specific folder and we also see a trigger when a file is updated in a specific folder but not its subfolders. So there are many different options that you can choose from. For now we're going to choose this one, new file in folder because this is a very common use case. Usually, you want to trigger this when a new file is added in a specific folder for that specific purpose that you want to automate. So, I'm going to click here and we see this trigger event. And this process, just so you know, it's the same for any application that you want to connect. You will have to select the trigger event. And before we move on, there is something very important that I think I should mention. Polling that you can see over here means that the app Zapier is going to pull the application. It's going to check. Polling is sort of like checking. It's going to check every once in a while, every few minutes or every like specific time period determined by Sapier. The the SAP or Sapier the platform is going to check if a new file has been created in that folder and if it has the SAP will be triggered. So it's not necessarily immediately like it's not like you immediately upload a file and then this app is triggered automatically with polling. There might be a small delay until the poll is completed. Okay.

And now we need to connect to Google Drive. This uh message over here tells you that Google Drive is a secure partner with Zapier. Your credentials are encrypted and can be removed at any time. You can manage all of your connected accounts here. if you ever want to remove some of those permissions. So, we're going to sign in. Now, I chose my Gmail account from the window where I can select my email. And now, it says that Zapier wants access to my Google account. When you allow this access, Zapier will be able to see, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files. Okay? And you can review all of this and then click continue. I'm going to click continue here. And there we go. We see that I've connected my Google Drive account and this is being used in one app. I can change my account over here. If I click on change, I can also view SAPs connected to this account that are using this account. Test my connection, reconnect and edit the connection name. So, let's continue.

Now, we need to configure the event itself. We set that we want to trigger this up when a new file is created in a specific folder. Here I am in my in my drive in my Google Drive inside a folder that I just created which is called sapiier. This folder is in my drive. So let's see if we can have access to this. What drive are we going to choose? where we have to choose a value my Google Drive over here. Which folder? Well, Zapar is going to extract all the folders that we have here. And right now, I only have two folders. Integration demo, which was for another project, and this one, which is Zapier. You can choose the folder that you want to trigger the SAP. This one, Sapier. And we need to choose if we want to include subfolders. true or false. I'm going to choose true because I want all the files to be automatically added to the spreadsheet. Now, if we say true, we are asked to enter a subfolder depth limit. If we want more information about the value, we can click here on the information icon. The maximum number of subfolder levels to search. Higher values may impact performance. The default is five. I think that's a good number. I think five is a good number. I don't think I would ever have more than five levels of subfolders. So, I'm going to keep the default. If you keep the field empty, you will be using the default value. And we see here include deleted files. By default, you see only return non-deed files. But you can also choose only return deleted files. Return both deleted and non-deleted files. I'm going to keep the default one that makes most sense in this case. Continue.

Test your trigger. Let's test the trigger. Test trigger. We see that no file was found because I don't have any files at the moment. I need to upload a file. I'm going to upload this file, welcome to free code camp, to my Sapier account where I'm trying to test the trigger. It's a PDF file. And then I'm going to test the trigger again. This time we see that it worked because we have a file that we can use to test the trigger. We found records in your Google Drive account. We will load up to three most recent records that have not appeared previously. Here when I click find new records, it's finding the recent file. Every time I click on it, it's adding like one new record that I can select. But if I click here on one of these files, I can check all the information that Google Drive is sharing with Zapier about this file like user permission, owner names, and all of the different attributes of that file in the Google Drive API, which is how applications communicate. Google Drive is communicating with Zapier behind the scenes, and that's what we see here. We can see that this is the file because original file name is welcome to free code camp. That's the file that I just uploaded. So I know it is correct. So continue with the selected record. Now since I've already configured my trigger, you can see that this one has a check mark. So it's ready. Now we are going to configure the action. So let's configure the action.

Great. So now that we have the trigger set up, let's configure the action. The action is what will happen when the trigger occurs? Like when we upload a new file to the Zapyard folder on my Google Drive, what action will occur? Well, let's click on it so we can configure it. It's basically the same as configuring the trigger. We choose the application that will be connected or related to that step. Then we set up the all the information what we want to keep the data that we want to use and there we go. So let's do it. Our workflow is basically when we upload the file we want to add some information about the file to a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. So I'm going to filter the applications by writing here sheets and there I can select Google Sheets. Now I see the option to configure the event. What action event do I want to trigger? Well, I can see all the events. You can see that this is very customized and very customizable to fit your needs. It really depends on the application that you're choosing. What you're going to see here, here we want to create let's say create spreadsheet. No, I want to work on an existing spreadsheet. I'm going to filter. I want to create a row. Create a spreadsheet row in a specific spreadsheet. This is exactly what we are looking for. So, filtering this is very helpful. Create spreadsheet row. Before we do that, we do actually need to have the spreadsheet created. So, I'm going to create it really quickly here. A blank spreadsheet. Sappier files is how I'm going to name this spreadsheet. And I'm going to zoom in so you can see this a little bit better. Maybe that's too much. Okay, let's keep it at at 125. Okay, awesome. And I'm going to zoom in this too so you can see the file and the information a bit better. Okay, awesome. Now let's connect the account. Sign in. Now we see this message. Zapier wants additional access to your Google account. When you allow this access, Zapier will be able to see, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheet spreadsheets. Okay, we're going to see that Zapier already has some access that is to Google Drive. But for each one of those services or applications, you're going to need to grant those permissions. So, we continue with this And then we see this. Now we've successfully connected to our Google Sheets account. So let's continue.

Now we're going to configure the event. What drive are we going to take the information from? From my Google Drive. The spreadsheet will be this one. Sapier files. You will see a list of all the spreadsheets that you currently have. And then what worksheet do we want to edit or add information to? That is very important as well because if you add multiple if you have multiple worksheets, let's say, let me show you sheet one, sheet two. If you have multiple sheets over here, you will also need to choose which one you want to edit over here. Right now, we only see one, but we modified the spreadsheet. How can we get this new information? If you click on refresh over here, you will see sheet two. So now you have two sheets that you can choose from. Now let's choose sheet one. And we see use time zone setup on spreadsheet to format date values. Let's see more information about this. If true, the time zone setup in the spreadsheet will be used to format the date values. By default, this is false. So, let's keep it false and then we can tweak it or modify it. This is something that we might edit and I will show you how to edit a SAP in just a moment. And here at the bottom, we see enter text or insert data. This is basically the data that will be added to the row that we are going to create. Remember that we are creating a new row. So, we need the new information. For field mapping, we can use the forward slash like this. And this will show us all the information that Zapier is extracting from that Google Drive file that we set up in the previous step. You can see how this is all like a a linked chain. I want to keep track of the title. I also want to keep track of the date when it was created. And I want to keep track of the URL. Let's see if I can find the URL. this web content link like this. So that's basically the information that I want to write that I want to add to the spreadsheet. I'm going to continue.

And now we can test this. Send rows to Google Sheets. To test Google Sheets, we need to create a new row or rows. This is what will be created. Let's see. We are going to test the step right now. So, let's see if this works. Test step. This is the perfect moment to set up your SAP the way you need it. If you see that something is not working the way you wanted to, you can always go back and reconfigure everything or some things that you need to tweak. A row was sent to Google Sheets about 0 seconds ago. So, let's see in my Google Sheets what I'm getting here. I am getting everything on the same column. And that is not exactly what I want. So let's see how we can reconfigure this. Before we start adding information to the spreadsheet, we need to prepare the spreadsheet a little bit because we right now we don't have any columns. So Sappiier will not know where we want the information to go. Right? So let's say title, date created, and URL. Those will be our columns in this case. Now I'm going to refresh the fields. And now if I click here on this little arrow where I can see refresh fields, you can see that Zapier is taking those changes in like almost real time. When I click on this button and you can see the different fields that we can map our Google Drive data to, it's taking the information from Google Drive like in a linked chain where we get the information from the file and then we can use that information in Google Sheets. Here you can see title, date created and URL the different columns that we have over here in the spreadsheet. If you add them after you set up the connection like I just did, you just need to click here on the refresh fields button. Then for each one of these, you can enter the text or insert the data that you want to insert over here. Where are you going to take the data from? From the file that you just uploaded to Google Drive that triggered the entire SAP. For field mapping, we use the forward slash on the keyboard like this. And this will show you all the different options that you can select. You really have a lot to choose from. I'm going to choose title over here for the title column. And then the date created. Let's see here. Create a date. Okay. And then I'm going to choose web content link. Yeah, I think this is the one that we're looking for. So you can see how we are taking that structure of the spreadsheet and we're saying hey for each file that I upload I want you to extract the title extract the date when that file was created and extract the URL in Google Drive so I can actually get the file continue.

Now we are going to test our SAP send rows to Google sheet. To test Google Sheets, we need to create a new row or rows. This is what will be created. We see the data that will be sent in. We see title for this specific file that we are testing. We see the date created in this format and we see the URL. If we want to find any specific information that we are sending as an input, we can filter that on the search bar over here. But at this moment, we don't. We also have additional information here which is like the spreadsheet that we're going to be editing the worksheet. Zero means that it is the first one on the on the list. It's the first one and time zone false. So I'm going to test the step and it's sending a row. A row was sent to Google sheet about 0 seconds ago. And here we go. You can see this. We can expand this and we have that information on the spreadsheet exactly like we wanted. Here we can see title, date created and URL. And you didn't have to do any of this manually. If you have like hundreds of files uploaded over there, you will also have a record on the spreadsheet automatically without you having to do anything. And this is just a simple example but I think it shows how powerful these automations can be. So once we are happy with how this uh SAP is working we can retest the step if we need to make any modifications. We can also edit this a little bit. If we need to edit the data that will be sent as input for the test. This is important as well in case you want to customize the test a little bit. You can click on the data and customize the test itself. If you want to see any of these values with different variations during the test or you can also publish your step. Publishing it just means that you will be like getting it live, getting it working and automating your process because so far it's just a draft. While you see this over here, it's a draft. It's it's there. It exists but it's not actually being triggered when the event happens. So let's publish it. I click on publish and we are preparing your SAP to go live. Yay, success. Your SAP is live. Your SAP is on and using version one. This message will dismiss in one second. Your SAP will run when the new file in folder trigger event in Google Drive occurs. You will see this custom for the different steps that you create. So we see this go home. And now if we go back and we go to the assets where we said that all the building blocks live, we see this in our SAPs. We see Google Drive to Google Sheets. Awesome. And these are the apps involved in the SAP where they are located currently. They are in my main personal folder. It's currently on, but you can turn it off. And that is very important. You can turn it off like this. And this way, when a new file is uploaded, the SAP won't be triggered at all. So, this is helpful if you want to stay on your monthly limits and you want to keep some of them on and some of them off, but you can still have them defined within Zapier, so you don't lose any of that configuration that you've already done. The owner is me, of course. And then we can also add this app to my favorites. My favorites is just a place where you can find all your favorite items over here. Favorites. Let me mark this as favorite. And if we go here to favorites, you will see the favorite items that I've selected. This will have a combination of all the different items in Zapier, so you can find them quickly. If you want to remove them from your favorites, just click on this again and you won't see it in your favorites anymore when you go back. And finally, you can manage your subs over here by clicking on these uh this more options button. This is sub actions. You can rename your sub from here, view mute your sub history, duplicate, change owner, move to folder, and you can also delete it from here. So, all of these options are available.

Now, since we have this app currently on, let's test this with a different file. I'm going to upload a file. This time, it's going to be an image. If I upload the file to this folder, let's see what happens. It's the folder that I've just configured for my SAP. I'm going to rename my file over here test image and I'm going to wait for a moment. Why? Because this SAP uses something called polling. You can see it over here. Let me show you. If we go back to the SAP by clicking on it, I just clicked on the name of the SAP over there. We can see that this specific trigger event is using polling. Why? Because you see this little clock over here that says 15 minutes. This is very important because you might initially think that the automation will run automatically. It will happen immediately. Well, that doesn't really happen with events that rely on polling. This means that this app will check for new data at this interval and it is currently set at 15 minutes. That is the polling trigger. So every 15 minutes it will be checking your Google Drive and see if there are new files that haven't been added to the Google sheet. And if that is the case, it will add it to the Google sheet. So we'll just have to go back to this sheet in about 15 minutes and see if this worked.

Another cool feature is that you can copy the steps if you need to. with this option copy and this will copy the step to your clipboard. So you can use it in other steps that you are creating or designing. Let's see how you can edit a SAP. So far we've created the SAP, we configured the steps and we've seen how you can manage the SAP. But how can you edit the SAP? You search for the SAP. You can also find it here with the search bar. You can filter your saps with different filters by status, by apps. And if you go here to the app that you're looking for and click on the name of the app, you can go here to the SAP editor where you will see the steps and you can edit the SAP to fit your needs by just clicking here on edit on the corresponding step. like this. You can change anything at any time and retest your sub and the the steps and check that they are working as intended.

Now, another important thing is how to navigate this user interface because so far it has been really centered and it's it's been looking great. But what happens if you have more advanced or more complex workflows and you want to reposition them on the screen? Well, if you have a mouse with a middle mouse wheel, well, you can just press the middle mouse wheel and this will drag the sap or the steps the diagram when you move your mouse. If you have the middle mouse wheel, you can also with the middle mouse wheel, you can go up or down. But if you want to move it with more freedom, you can just press the middle mouse button and it will move to wherever you want the sap to be. This option zoom to fit is also very helpful because it basically fits everything that you have to the screen so you can see it better.

If we go back to the subs, we can also see that here we have a trash folder because when you delete a sap, you the saps will go to your trash just in case so you don't lose anything. These are some test sample tasks that I was testing and I deleted them and they're now in my trash. So I can make sure that I actually want to delete them and delete them if necessary. From the assets, I can also create SAPs by clicking on the create button over here.

Awesome. So we've configured a SAP with a trigger and the action. So let's continue. This is like the fundamental core building block, but

We also have a lot more to see. So let's continue. Great work so far during the course. Now you know the fundamental building blocks of automation in Zapier, which are Zaps. So let's expand your knowledge of Zaps with Zapier's built-in tools.

Built-in tools were developed by Zapier and they allow you to create more, let's say, complex or more specific workflows with more generic tools that are not dependent specifically on any application. They do use data that comes from external applications. They perform operations on that data like filtering, like formatting, but they are not dependent on any specific application. They are generic and there to help you with your Zapier workflows. So let's get started with one of them.

It is important to mention that in Zapier, with a free account, you can only create two-step workflows. These built-in tools are also considered as a step. So you can only use two steps in your workflows with the free accounts. So let's click here on create and let's create another Zap. Currently, you can create as many Zaps as you want to. Just defining them and designing them and creating them doesn't have any limits. The limits on your Zapier account is how you use them, like the tasks that you're going to run per month. But you can have as many Zaps as you want, at least at this moment when I'm recording the course.

So now this is our second Zap. And I'm going to do something different now so I can show you how this, how all of this works with different tools. In this case, our trigger is going to be different. It's going to be one of these popular built-in tools. You can see these options: Schedule, Email, RSS, Code, Email Parser, Sub-Zap. We are going to choose Schedule. Why? Because Schedule will help you to do something every week, every month, every day. You can select the time period between those actions. So, it's very helpful to schedule when something happens automatically at a specific day and time. I'm going to choose Schedule here as the trigger. And you can see that it is taking one step. And with a free account, we can create only two steps. So, you should consider that, take that into account when you're going to use these built-in tools. For now, let's go with Schedule.

Schedule by Zapier. Trigger event. We're going to choose an event: Custom frequency, every day, every hour, every month, or every week. Let's say in this case, this hypothetical scenario, you are managing a team and the team communicates through Google Chat. Let's say this could be another chat application, for example, like Slack or Discord. You can have those app integrations as well with Zapier. I'm going to use Google Chat in this case. So what I want to do is that every Monday, every Monday morning, I want to send a message asking everyone to share their priorities and to-dos for the for the week, like what they will be working on as a reply to that message on Google Chat on the main, let's say, the team chat. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to trigger this every week on the day selected every week. Then I'm going to configure that by clicking on continue. What day of the week? I want this to be on Monday. Let's say time of day. Well, this is based on my current time zone. Okay, you can change this in the Zap details like we saw initially when we checked the the user interface. So, I want to send this at, let's say, 10:00 a.m. I think this would be a nice time to start like asking the team what they will be working on. Let's say 10, maybe 10:30, so they can have a cup of coffee before that. Okay, 10:30 a.m. I'm going to continue.

Now, we're going to test the trigger. We're going to run the weekly trigger to make sure it's working. Test the trigger. Now if we want to test the record, well, we see this: the date, time, day of the week. So we have a trigger. This is like testing that the entire weekly trigger process is working correctly. Now we continue and now we are taken to actually like the action to completing the action. You won't actually see like a confirmation that the trigger was successfully configured. You can click outside of this somewhere in the dark area to confirm that this over here has been configured successfully: Scheduled by Zapier. If you click on it, you can edit the details. But now we have to configure the action. What is going to happen every Monday? Well, we want to do something on Google Chat, right? So, we're going to filter by Google Chat. Google Chat. Now we need to choose an action event. What are we going to do? We're going to create a message. Like this. Awesome. And we need to connect our account. Remember, for every one of these like applications or subservices, we need to grant permissions in our personal or work accounts. So, I'm going to sign in. And I'm being asked if I want to allow the Zapier bot to access this information for me: my name and profile picture and my email address. Yes, I'm going to grant those permissions so Zapier can post on my behalf. This is a simple example. Of course, you can customize this to whatever you need to do in Google Chat or any other applications.

Okay, so let's continue. Now, where do we want to share this? Hangouts Chat room. Let's go to Google Chat for this account that I have for the course demo. And I'm going to create a space here. Let's say the team chat. Since we'll be working with technology, I'm going to choose a laptop here for the emoji. So, I'm going to create the chat. Of course, you can assume that this is already created for your team. But now, we have this collaboration space: Team Chat. After this initial setup, you click on continue. And then you're going to be asked to configure where you want to post that message. Well, right now we see that that no options are available. Why is that? You might initially think that there is an issue, but no, there is an additional step that you need to perform here that you need to complete here on Google Chat. What is that? Well, you need to install the Zapier app. Right here, you can see that I have two spaces. I created a Team Chat and an Announcements Chat just to simulate like that kind of structure that you would have in a normal team workspace. So now we're going to here go to here to explore apps and we need to add this Zapier app. We can find this Zapier for Google Chat. Now if we click here and then we install it, we add it to the space. Let's install this app. It has been successfully installed and now we need to add it to a space. Continue. We want to add Zapier for Google Chat to the space that we want to see here in this list over here. If we want the the specific space in Google Chat to be listed over here as an option in Zapier, we need to install or add that application in that space. So here when we see this option, let's say that we want to add it to Team Chat over here. We can also choose the Announcements Chat just to see, just to check that this will enable both of them. They'll show both of them in the list. So we've added that application, that bot, to the spaces and now we see "Hello, I can create messages in the space from Zapier Zaps." Great. Now we see these commands: Zapier Settings, Zapier Feedback, Zapier Help. "There are no users configured to allow Zaps to be shown here. Use the buttons below to allow Zaps to be shown here." Okay, let's say I'm going to allow Zaps and I can see that my user Stephania can create messages here with Zaps. And then we see "Zapier visit Zapier to set up Zaps with the Google Chat action." Awesome. That's what we are doing. Let's see this new message in the Team Chat. Let's say "Allow Zaps" over here. And I can see that I can create messages here with Zaps. "Allow Zaps." And over here I also see "Allow Zaps." This is basically adding me as a user who can create messages here with Zaps. And my Gmail account is associated to Google Chat, of course. And now my Zapier account will have access to these spaces. If I go here, I can also modify the settings. Let's go back to Zapier. And I refresh this over here. I now see the spaces listed in Zapier. Awesome, right? That is one extra step that you need to do on Google Chat to actually configure Zapier for Google Chat. So you have to go there and then go back to Zapier. Important. Then once we see these uh chats, we also see the Zapier add direct message, Announcements Chat, Team Chat. I'm going to choose Team Chat. The message title and the message text are the only mandatory fields here. We also have a subtitle. We want to keep it simple. Let's say "Happy Monday team. Please share what you'll be working on this week in the reply." We're going to keep it simple here. You can make it as detailed as you like. "Happy Monday, Team Chat. Please share what you'll be working on this week in the reply." Continue.

Now we're going to test it. This is the really cool part where you get to see what you've just created in action. To test Google Chat, we need to create a new create. This is what will be created. Okay, we see the test title: "Happy Monday team. Please share what you'll be working on this week in the reply." Empty fields. You can also edit this, but we're going to test this. This is sending a message to Google Chat as a test. And let's see, let's see, let's see. We go here. We see in Team Chat, we see that Zap sent by Stephania. We see this: "Happy Monday, team. Please share what you'll be working on this week in the reply." Awesome. Right now, you have an automated reminder every Monday because we are scheduling that with the Zapier scheduler and that will remind your team of sharing their weekly goals in the reply there. Isn't that awesome? You can customize this, of course, to anything you'd like to share on Google Chat automatically and you can basically connect any apps, but Google Chat is a really helpful tool. So, I just wanted to show you this. Awesome.

So, now let's publish this. Now, we are publishing this Zap. Remember that this Zap won't trigger automatically unless we publish it. So even if you're using Schedule here, if this Zap is not published or toggled on, you won't actually get the automation. Now let's rename this Zap. This is very important because when you create this Zap, by default, it will be untitled. Now if you rename it, let's say "Weekly Monday Team Goals on Google Chat" or let's say "Monday Team Goals on Google Chat." I press enter and then my changes were autosaved. It's always good to assign a descriptive name to your Zaps to keep them organized. Awesome.

So now we have this great simple Zap, but it's very powerful. Now I'm going to show you how you can organize your Zaps into multiple folders. This is very important, especially when you start defining multiple Zaps and you can like categorize them or group them into specific folders to keep them organized and so you know exactly where they are and where to find them. So first of all, let's go to Assets over here and in Assets, you see this Folders. In the Folders tab, you will see this. This is my personal folder where you can see, you will see your name or username over there and you see that this is personal, the owner. You can also mark this as favorite. You can add it to your favorites and you have folder options. Now we see that this is grayed out because this is the main folder that Zapier created by default for you. If you want to create another folder, you can click here on Create. You can create a Zap or create a new folder. Let's create a new folder. Let's say that I want to create this folder: Zapier Course. I'm going to click Save. And there we go. I have a new folder: Zapier Course. I can move some of my Zaps to this folder if I need to. And I can also create a subfolder within this main folder. Or I can create a sub directly within this folder. Let's create a subfolder. Let's say Team Messages. And you can see here that we are creating this hierarchy. We have Zapier Course and Team Messages. And now let's say that we want to create another folder but at the same level as Team Messages. We want it to be directly within Zapier Course. To create a subfolder within the Zapier Course folder, we go to Create and then New Subfolder. Then we assign a name. Let's say that we want to, we have a sub for Files Upload or for, let's call this Workflow. These are like the Zaps related directly to my workflow. Save. And I can use these folders to categorize or group my different assets, my Zaps, my forms, and everything that we're going to learn during the course.

Now, how do I move or relocate the Zap to one of these folders? Well, we go to Zaps over here. And then we find the Zap that we want to move. This is one way of doing that. Then let's say that I want to move this to my Workflow folder. Well, I can click here on Zap Actions and then Move to Folder. After that, I'm going to see the hierarchy of folders and I can choose where I want to have or store my Zap. In this case, I'm going to choose Workflow. Move to Folder. And I see a confirmation message saying that this Zap was moved to the Workflow folder. I can do the same with this Zap that we created with the Monday team goals message. I'm going to move it to the Team Messages folder. And that way I have it categorized very quickly. You can see the current location over here, which is helpful to know where it is. And you can also go to that location by clicking on it right here. Right now I am in my Workflow folder over here. Awesome. If we go to Team Messages, we also see this over here and Zapier Course. We have the two subfolders. So that's how you can start creating your hierarchy. You also have this personal folder over here. If we want to see all our folders, we can also go here to this enclosing like main folder called Folders.

Now I'm going to go back to my main folder over here, like the Folders folder. And now I'm going to create a new sample folder to show you how you can delete folders. I'm going to create it. Then I click on Create. Then New Folder. Then Sample Folder. Well, that's the name that you want to assign. Then Save. And there we go. We have our new folder created. It might just take a few seconds. And now if we go into that folder, Sample Folder. Now we are inside Sample Folder. And if I click here on the folder options menu, I can choose to delete it over here. So, Delete. Are you sure that you want to delete it? Yes, you can delete it. And there we go. It has been deleted. This is a helpful way to stay organized within Zapier. Awesome.

Great work so far. So far we have been creating automated workflows in the traditional way, right? We have been selecting the applications ourselves. We have been configuring the applications ourselves. However, there is a new tool that Zapier is including and that I want to show you in the course so you know how to use it and how to create workflows much faster. This is called Copilot. It's currently in AI beta, so it may change from the time that I recorded this video from the time that you take the course, but the overall notions, concepts, and the user interface should be very similar. Okay, so you will find this tool in your Home tab. You will also find it at the bottom right of the different editors that you're going to be working with. So now here we can see it at the front and center. We have Copilot. "Enter an idea or app name to get started." And here below we see "Attach file" which is coming soon. You should know that this tool is powered by artificial intelligence. So it is like a chat interface that can help you create your workflows and you can interact with it, refine your workflows. It can, it's, it's there to help you, to help you refine your initial idea and see what is possible within your plan and what is not possible. It's very helpful as well if something is not possible with your free plan. It will also give you alternatives and how you can refine or restructure the workflow. Now here you can see in the interface "Attach file" coming soon. At some point this will be available attaching files. This is helpful for providing additional context to the tool, like if you have some knowledge base that the tool should be aware of. If you have some documents or some internal team uh like handbooks or guidelines, that is where you can attach your files. Then you have "Dictate." In this particular example, I'm going to write, but you can also dictate. And this is to press Enter. Once we have this described here, you can see some examples of prompts. A prompt is basically like an instruction that you give to the AI tool, in this case Copilot, what you want it to do. Here you can see some examples like "Send motivational reminders," "Notify team members."

So what are we going to be working on? We're going to create a Zap that will be triggered when a new GitHub issue is opened in a specific repository and it will send us a notification on Google Chat. So, let's say that you're working on a team and you want Google Chat to be like your central work hub. You don't want to be jumping around between applications or checking your email to see if you got a notification from GitHub. No, you can centralize all of that if you want to in Google Chat or the chat tool of your preference, like for example, Discord or Slack. There you can choose the application. In this case, we're going to use Google Chat. When someone opens an issue, you're going to get a notification with some information of that issue that it would be helpful also to know that it's there to triage it and you can also start discussing it on directly on Google Chat. We're going to create a space called GitHub Issues and that's where we are going to receive those notifications. So let's get started.

Now, what do we want to create? We wanted the workflow to send a Google Chat message every time a new GitHub issue is opened. As simple as that. We're going to start with a very simple prompt and I'm going to show you how you can refine it step by step. You can also make your prompt a lot more detailed than this if you want to get a better result in the first place, like immediately. But I'm going, I think that an iterative approach is also helpful. So I'm going to show you that. "Send a Google Chat message every time a new GitHub issue is opened." So we're going to send it. We're notice that here I am mentioning two key things here. I'm mentioning the two applications that I want to connect: a Google Chat message. So we're using Google Chat and GitHub. So Zapier knows what we want to connect. I'm going to send it over here. And now I get the chat interface where I can see Copilot thinking and it will reply.

Okay, this is a reply. "The search tool isn't returning detailed actions, but both apps are confirmed to exist based on standard Zapier functionality. Here is your workflow: Send Google Chat message on a new GitHub issue." The trigger would be GitHub: New Issue Opened. That is correct. And the action would be Google Chat: Send Message. Awesome. We just need to configure it, but the overall logic is there. This is a simple two-step Zap that works great with your free plan. You can see that the output is even customizing it to my plan. It supports two-step Zaps with up to 100 tasks per month. So, we can have up to like 100 of those notifications, but this applies to all the account, to the entire account. Okay? So, 100 tasks in your entire account per month. Now, what happens when someone opens a new issue in your GitHub repository? The Zap triggers. A message is automatically sent to your Google Chat space with the issue details. Awesome. To set this up, you'll connect your GitHub account and select the repository that you want to monitor. You'll specify which Google Chat space, which like the room in this case, the space or direct message receives the notification. You can also send it as a direct message if you need to. You can customize the message with issue details like title, description, and assignee. And here we are applying it to issues. But you can also adapt this to work perfectly with pull requests, which is also helpful for code reviews and for keeping those pull requests being reviewed constantly. That is also part of a real workflow of the developers every day. Ready to build this Zap? I'll take you to the editor to configure the trigger actions and message content. Yes, I'm ready to build the Zap. It sounds great.

So, let's continue with the Zap editor. And now we are in the Zap editor. You can see that Copilot already renamed or assigned a name to this Zap: "Send Google Chat message on new GitHub issue." Awesome, right? So, you can see the previous message and now we see something new. "I need you to connect your GitHub account." Let me prompt you to sign in. Okay. So, we're going to sign into GitHub. You can do that, of course, like that process manually here, or you can continue the conversation with Copilot. I'm going to sign into GitHub over here. Now, I see "Authorize Zapier." Zapier wants to access my account. This is a GitHub account that I created for the course. Now, it wants to read and write GitHub notifications. You can check all of this information and determine if you want to authorize Zapier. We're going to authorize Zapier. And once we've provided that permission, those permissions, we are going to continue the process.

Excellent. Now, let me configure the GitHub trigger. Now, Copilot is going to think for a little bit. And you can see it working in the background. You will also see some changes here in the configuration. But don't worry, you can always like edit this and ask it to make changes. Now it's setting everything up, but I want to check this manually. Make sure that it has configured it the way I wanted to. Let's see here. We have "New Issue." We have the "Setup Trigger Event: New Issue." That is correct. Configure. Well, which types of issues should this trigger on? This is very helpful as well. You can determine if this will trigger on any issue that you can see, only issues assigned to you, only issues created by you, only issues you're mentioned in, and only issues you are subscribed to. I'm going to enable it for any issue. You can see organization. That would be me. If you are part of an organization, you can also connect this to an organization. Now the repo. The repository. I created a sample repository here called "team-project" in my demo GitHub account so we can test this. Now I'm going to choose a repository over here. And then here we have "Label." "Will only trigger on issues when this label is added." So you can also choose to explain this field. Let's ask Copilot to explain this field. "Tell me more about the label field." It has sent a prompt to Copilot. If we want more information about this, we can ask Copilot by clicking on that option. We can see that the label field is an optional field that lets you narrow down which GitHub issues will trigger your Zap. You can customize this basically to your liking. Right now, we're going to trigger this for any issues. So, we're just not going to choose a value. Continue.

Now, we want to test our trigger to confirm if your trigger is set up correctly. It will find a recent new issue on your account. So, I'm going to open an issue here as a demo issue. I'm going to go to Issues, New Issue. "I found a small typo on the landing page of the application." So, just as a demo, something quick and simple. So, Create. I'm going to create the issue. And here we go: "Typo on the landing page." Now we're going to test our trigger. Let's see if this issue is detected. We see that no issue was found. We want to test the trigger again. I just created the issue. So I had to click again on Test on the Test button. And now it found the new issue: "New Issue A." So if we click on it, we will see all the data that we got from the GitHub API. All the data related to that issue. Here we can see the body: "I found a small typo on the landing page of the application." That would be what we know as a description. That would that is the body. Now for the title, we can also find the title here: "Typo on the landing page." So we can use all of this data as we need to in the message that we're going to send to Google Chat to customize the message. But we are getting the new issues correctly. So we can continue with the selected record.

Now we go to the action itself to Google Chat. Now what do we want to do? Action event. Copilot has configured this to be "Create Message." Exactly what we wanted. Now my account was already set up when we connected the and granted the per the permissions in a previous example during the course. Remember that we worked with Google Chat previously. So it's already connected. Now I'm going to continue or configure. And now I see what Copilot has prepared for me. For message title, it's choosing the title of the GitHub issue. And for the message text, it's including the body, the issue number, which is also helpful, issue number, the author of the issue, and the URL. So it was smart enough to know the key information that we need to extract from the issue. You can customize this, but I think this works great. So, I'm going to keep it as it is. "Action button text." We can also add an action button and action button URL if we want to include a button or what to do with that issue. Okay. So, now it is configuring the Hangouts Chat room to be Team Chat. I don't want it to be Team Chat. So, I can just, let's say, I'm going to create a new chat. I want to create something very specific here. I'm going to create a new space called "GitHub Issues." And since this is coding related, I'm going to use a laptop as the emoji as well. GitHub Issues. Okay. Now remember that in Google Chat, you need to have the Zapier application installed over here. Here you will see an option to install applications. You just go to that interface. You select the Zapier for Google Chat application. We did that in a previous example. You can check that out. And there you will also need to provide permissions in each one of those spaces for a particular user to send messages with the Zapier application. So in GitHub Issues, we want to include Zapier here. For that, we're going to click here on Zapier. "There are no users configured to allow Zaps to be shown here." So I'm going to "Allow Zaps" over here. Now I am allowed to send Zaps to this space and that will give me access to this particular space on Zapier. Now I should be able to see when I refresh this as well the GitHub Issues space. Awesome. Right now I see GitHub Issues and I can select this one, which is the most appropriate one. Remember that with Copilot you have like an assistant. It's helping you. It might not give you exactly what you want at first. So this combination of AI helping you and your manual adjustments, I think is the best approach.

Now let's see "Action button text." Now let's ask Copilot what is "Action button text." "Explain what action button text is, please." Now, let's see. Let's see what we get. I'm just showing you all the options because Copilot can help you to create the workflow, but it can also help you clarify some things about the user interface. It knows the entire context of Zapier. Now, the "Action button text" lets you add an interactive button to your Google Chat message with custom label text. This field is optional. You don't need to use it. You enter the text that should appear on the button. For example, "View Issue." The button appears in the Google Chat message for quick access to related actions. You must also fill in the "Action button URL" field. That's the link the button points to when clicked. Please add an action button text, an action button with the text "Go to Issue" and the URL should be the URL of the issue. Okay. So now the Copilot is going to change this. We're going to see the change over here and how it's being updated. And we see "Go to Issue." Awesome. We didn't have to type that one. And it's automatically adding that dynamic field, which is the HTML URL of the issue. So we can just click on the button and go and check out the issue.

Now let's continue. Awesome. Continue. Now let's test this. This is the data that will be provided as input to the test. "Typo on the landing page." We see the text, we see the data, we see the URL, and we also see the button text "Go to Issue." We might omit the URL in the information, but just seeing it raw without the button could be helpful as well if we need to copy paste it, if we need to do something with the URL. So, I'm going to keep it for now. And we'll also have the button text with the URL as the destination. Test step like this. And now if we go to Google Chat, we see this Zap sent by Stephania. Here we see the information of that issue: "Typo on the landing page." And we see the description, the issue number, author, and the URL. And we also see the action button text and the connected URL. If we click here on "Go to Issue," it will take us to the issue on GitHub. Awesome, right? So, that is one way of connecting all your applications to be more efficient. You can send that information directly to Google Chat and use that as your central hub of information. It might could make you a lot more productive. Plus, another plus here is that if you have like this central place on Google on Google Chat, you can click here on reply and start a conversation with your teammates, with your colleagues about the issue. You can discuss it and you will keep everything on the same thread related to the issue and everyone can just click on it and go check it out on GitHub. So, it's centralizing the information. Let's say, for example, let's discuss this. I'm sending the message and you can see that it is part of a thread here related to that specific issue. I think this one could be very helpful in our daily workflow as developers. This workflow can also be perfectly adjusted to working with pull requests. It's basically the same thing. Instead of using the trigger "New Issue," it would be "New Pull Request" and you would extract the information from the pull request just like we did for GitHub issues. This way you can have a space for pull requests and you can receive them on Google Chat. You can also customize them to receive them as a direct message instead of sending them to a particular space. There are a lot of things that you can do here with the workflow. This is just an example.

Awesome. So now you know more about Copilot. Now in this gear icon you can clear the chat and over here you can copy some of the information that you got from Copilot. You can mark this as a good response, as a bad response. You can also choose the mode: Auto or Ask. Auto means that it will build instantly with no confirmation needed. You'll review before publishing, like just like we did. We just made all the adjustments that we needed and then we can click Publish when we are happy with our Zap. Now Ask is a little bit more engaged because Copilot will ask for confirmation before building. If you like to have more supervision over the entire process, I recommend using the Ask mode. This will take a bit more time, but you will be more precise with what Copilot is actually doing with your workflow. This is even more helpful for more complex workflows where you actually have things already set up and Copilot will not make changes without confirming with you first. You can also dictate and send new like messages to Copilot. That's basically how it works. To hide Copilot, you can click here, Close, and then to show it again, you go here to this icon on the bottom left. Really awesome, right? So this is how you can work with Copilot and I was very excited to share this example with you because we are actually working with GitHub and the developer workflow and Google Chat. So yeah, this is a a real-world example of something that we use every day and that we can automate. So let's continue.

Now we're going to cover Zapier Tables. So I will see you there. In this chapter, we're going to dive into Zapier Tables, which are similar to spreadsheets, but more powerful for automation. They are specifically designed with automation in mind. You should use Zapier Tables when you need some sort of human approval. You will be able to include human approval by adding a button in a specific column if you need to. So, when the team member clicks on that button, that triggers a Zap or an automated process. You should also consider Tables when you have a process that involves data that is heavily reliant on automation. With Zapier Tables, you can track which columns are connected to different automations. And you should also consider this option when you need to consolidate information from multiple applications. So basically, when automation is at the core of how you're handling the data that is stored in that table, considering Zapier Tables can be helpful. So let's begin.

Let's start creating Zapier Tables. First, we go here to Zapier and then click on Create. Now, Create Tables. Now we see "How would you like to start?" We can import data from a CSV file or from another platform, which is usually what you will do if you already have a team or an organization set up. You have the initial data. You can use a template or you can start a blank table. We're going to start a blank table so I can show you everything from the start, from the very beginning. So, blank table name. Let me share with you my idea for this chapter project or example. Let's say that we're handling an online technology publication where authors from all over the world share articles related to technology. Now, if we want to track author applications, we can do that with a Zapier Table. Specifically, this can be helpful because we can connect Zapier Tables to Zapier Forms. So applicants can fill out the form with their information and then we can collect all of that data directly in the table and then connect it to different automations like approving their applications. So that is the context of our example and how what we're going to create over here. Description. The description is optional. Right now, we're only going to write the table name: "Author Applications." Create Table.

Now we see our blank table. Awesome. There are many elements in this UI, in this user interface. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see them better. Like this. Awesome. We see that Copilot is displayed by default. You already like know how to use the AI Copilot from the previous chapter. You just need to interact with it in the chat interface. I'm going to show you the manual way and then we're going to use Copilot. So let's dive into the user interface. Let's go from left to right. Here we see on the sidebar "Linked Assets." This is where you can see all the Zaps, Forms, Chatbots, and Canvas that are connected to this table. That is why initially I said that you should consider Zapier Tables if your workflow that works with that data is heavily reliant on automations because with Zapier Tables you can keep track of everything that is sort of like connected and how it is connected to your table during the entire workflow and automation. We can filter the contents of the table just like we would in a spreadsheet. We can choose the field, the condition, and apply the filters. We will do that in just a moment. Then we can hide certain fields and then here we have the settings like the name of the table, the description. Then if we want to send records, this by default is pending. Why? Records created or updated manually will be marked as pending until you send them to your Zaps. So the data will not trigger Zaps automatically. Or you can also choose this: Automatically. Records created or updated manually will be sent automatically to your Zaps. This really depends on your needs and your particular workflow. By default, they won't be sent automatically. Account record usage. In the free account, right now, we have a a limit of 2500 records. Those would be equivalent to like the rows on a spreadsheet, the records. 2500 is our limit right now. This really depends on your plan. Then we see "Transfer Ownership" or "Delete this Table." So now we've seen all the settings.

Now we go here. This is our main table where we store all the records right now. And we can create something called a "View." What is a View? A View is basically like a subset of the table that meets certain criteria. Like let's say you have other applications from different countries and you just want to see all the applicants that are from, let's say, Japan. Like that would be a great candidate for a View because it will extract all the records that match that country and you will be able to see them in a View, but the records will still be there on the main table. It's like creating a subset but still keeping it connected to the main table. So the records will be on the main table and they will also be part of that View. You're not like creating something separate from the main table. You're still keeping everything there connected. I'm going to show you an example in just a moment. Then we filter, hide fields, save as view. We can also save this. If we apply some filters, we can save it as a View with this button here. We can search for specific records. You can search up to 1,000 records in a View. Then this "Create" button is something that we will use in just a moment. And for more options, you click here on the ellipses. Download all records or import records. Below we have other options that you may want to explore like importing. You can import data from a CSV file and other supported formats. You can export the data, download the data, and automate your data.

So let's start with the basics and let's add some fields. To add a field, you click here and then you can select the type of field that you want to add. We have Text, Long Text, Date and Time, Number, Currency, Checkbox, Drop-down, Email, very helpful, Phone Number, Link, and JSON. We also have these sort of like special types of fields which are Formula, Linked Record, and Button. Button is something that we will use to trigger a process which is helpful for keeping a human in the loop. Let's say that we have an author application. We've reviewed it and we've decided that this author will be accepted. Well, that acceptance needs to have a human in the loop and that's what the button will be here for. We will do that in just a moment. And the button will trigger an automation Zap to congratulate the author on being accepted by email. We're going to add in this case a Text field. The Text field will be "Name." The name of the text field will be "Name." The field type will be Text. You can change this or filter this as well. Now for the alignment, I like left alignment. Let's see. And we can also choose an icon. An icon for the application or a generic icon. I'm going to keep the default icon for now. And we can also... Create. Create. The Name field was added successfully. Okay. Now we're going to add the different fields. Text Email. And we can search for this email over here. Alignment left. Create. Awesome. You can see that the icon is also like customized, which is cool.

Now if we go to Copilot, let's finish the process with Copilot because you already know like this manual way of doing it. Let me show you how you can do it with Copilot. "Add fields for Country, Username, Topics, because let's say that we only publish articles that cover Python and JavaScript as an example. We're going to have a drop-down menu to select these options to show you different variations of the of the types of fields that you can create. And we're going to have a Reviewed checkbox, an Approved checkbox, and then we're going to add a button, but that comes later." Okay, it would be best to specify the type. This would be text, but let's keep it generic and see what Copilot comes up with. I'm going to ask it to please confirm because it hasn't like really showed me any output. Okay, perfect. "I've added all five fields, five fields to your table." It added, you can see it here: Country, Username, Topics, Reviewed, and Approved. The types are Text, which is okay. Username is Text, which is okay. Topics. I want to make Topics a drop-down with two options. I'm going to ask Copilot to do that. Reviewed is a checkbox and Approved is a checkbox. "Now make Topics a drop-down field with two options: Python and JavaScript." Now let's see how it updates it. I'm going to ask it to confirm this or explain to me what it's going to do. Done. "The Topics field is now a drop-down with two options: Python and JavaScript." Let's see if this actually worked. If we try to create a new record by clicking here, we're going to close Copilot for now. I click here below "Add Record." I can confirm that this is actually a drop-down field. Python and JavaScript are the two options. Awesome. Right now, the data type of the field over here apparently was not edited correctly because the field type is still text. I'm going to notify this to Copilot and ask it to change the type of this field. It says, "Apologize for the confusion. I cannot change the type of an existing field, only its options. The Topics field was created as text type, and I updated it to include drop-down options. Here's what I can do: I can create a new Topics field as proper type with those two options." And you can delete the old Topics field manually. Okay? So we can't actually change the type of a field. It is good to know that. So it is explaining that to me. I want option two. Option two, please. I wanted to create a new one and then I can delete the old one. I'm just doing this to show you how you can interact with the Copilot as you work on Zapier. With the free account, you do have daily limitations, but we are going to use it as much as we can right now. So I can show you this. Okay, so it's adding a new view. And now I'm going to need to manually delete the old Topics field. Now it's created a new one here. And this one is something that I'm going to have to delete. Delete. I click on it and I delete the field. There we go. Now the last one is Topics. And if I, if we try to edit it, I see that it's a drop-down field and I see Python and JavaScript. I'm going to change the color of Python to yellow and JavaScript to, let's say, red. I wanted an orange, but let's say red. And I'm going to save it. Okay, now we see it as Python and JavaScript. Awesome. And when you have multiple fields, you can drag and drop them wherever you need to. I want this to be before Reviewed and Approved. So, I'm going to drag it. I'm clicking with my left mouse button and then drag it up. And while I have my left mouse button pressed, okay, I am keeping it pressed so I can drag it. I'm going to close Copilot for now and I'm going to enter some data for this record. I'm going to do that really quickly. Fast forward this process and then once I have the data ready, we'll come back.

Okay, so welcome back. Now we have our table ready and set up. We have some data, sample data. These are totally random names that I

chose. Uh, this is we have the name, the email of each one of these applicants. We have their countries, where they're from, username, the topics they're interested in writing about, if the application was reviewed, and if the application was approved. That is another important thing. We have this difference of reviewing something and then approving it. And we will add some automation to the approval process.

Now, this field that we generated with Copilot, I'm noticing that I want to edit it and I want to allow this to have multiple selections because an author can write about Python and JavaScript, right? So if I want to allow multiple selections, I can do that. Save. Convert to multi-select dropdown. Is it reversible? Are you sure you want to continue? Yes, I want to convert it. Thank you. So now let's say that Yoko wants to write about Python and JavaScript, and Gino wants to write about Python and JavaScript as well. So now we have that option. The checkboxes can be checked or unchecked as needed. It's also important to know that you can resize these fields for your convenience, however you'd like.

Let's talk about the views, the views that we were just talking about a moment ago. Here we are on the main table. Let's say that we want to filter this list in some way. Let's first apply a filter. What if we want to have all the applications that have been reviewed in one specific subset of the table? We want to access them really quickly and only see the reviewed applications. So, reviewed, we want to see all the applications that have been reviewed. So, where this value is true, where the checkbox is checked. And we can also add other conditions, like you can filter all the reviews that have been reviewed from a specific country. You can combine different conditions and make this more complex. For now, we're going to keep it simple. Apply filters.

Now, here we are applying this filter to this table. And we have this option to save it as a view. Notice that here we only have applications that have been reviewed. We are going to save it as a view and we're going to write the view name. Reviewed applications. You should assign a descriptive name for this. You can also add a description, but for now, this is optional. Reviewed applications. Awesome. Now we have this view. We see that the view was created. We can create a sub or create a data view. Now we see that we are in the reviewed applications view over here. One filter has been applied, and that is like a subset is filtering the main table, but the records are still living in the main table. This is just another way of looking at them, already filtered.

Now, if we want to go back to the main table, we click here on main table and we go back to it. We might need to remove any existing filters that we already applied if they are not already removed. Awesome. And if the best part here is that if we are on the main table and we update some of these values, like we don't make go here reviewed, then if we go back to the view, you won't see go. So it's taking the updated data in real time and filtering the data based on what is already there in the main table. Really helpful when you're working with a lot of different records. Awesome. So that is the concept of a view.

You may also want to create another view for all the applications that have been approved. Apply filters. Only the ones that have been approved. Now, we're going to save this one as a view. Approved applications. Create. Awesome. Now, we can go to this view. It's taking us directly to that view. Approved applications. You might need to wait for a few seconds until the view is created. Okay, might be a small delay. Then you go to the view automatically and you only see the applications that have been approved so far.

Now, to go back to the main table, you click here and you see all the applications. The filter will still be applied there when you go back to the main table. So you will need to click here on the X if you want to see all the records again, but the view will still be there in the list with the filters applied. Awesome. So now you have this table. Now, how does this connect to the automations? Because so far, we have been using it like a normal spreadsheet, right? Before I show you the automation, I'm going to show you how to import the data because I think this is also very important. You can click here on import and you can drag and drop to upload your file, your CSV file with your data. They must match the number of fields in the table. Like you should have the same number of fields on the CSV file as the number of fields that you currently have created on your table. Okay, but you just need to choose a file or drag and drop it over here and the data will be imported automatically.

Okay, so now let's go to the automation part of the Zapier tables. We're going to add a new field over here at the end. Add a field and we're going to make this field a button. A button that triggers or continues automations. Now, what are we going to call this field? We're going to call this approve, like the verb, not approved. Approve, because this button will trigger an action, will trigger a Zap. Then type a button. This will be a trigger Zap. You can choose continue Zap or trigger Zap. Default button label. This is the text that you will see on the button. This is required. We're going to say approve. Then default state is enabled. You can also disable it by default. And this is very important if you only want to trigger the process once. For example, in this author applications scenario, we would only want to trigger this once for every author because we're only welcoming the author once, right? It would be very strange to receive like five welcome messages from the organization, right? So, we want to make sure that we only send out one. For that, we need to enable this disable button when clicked. That way, the button will be disabled after the first time you click on it. So, we're going to create it and we can always edit it if we need to later on.

Now, you won't see the actual text. You will see that like this sort of warning that's asking you to set up the button. Let's read it. To set up this button, create a Zap that will run when the button is clicked. When that Zap is enabled, this button will become active. So, let's click on this button and that will take us to Zaps. Create a Zap that will run when this field is updated. We're going to create a Zap. This is going to take us to configure our automation, our linked Zap. Configure your automation. And we're back to the tool that you already know how to work with where we created the Zaps, right? We can use Copilot. We can use the manual process. But now we see that the trigger is automatically set up. Trigger Zap button clicked, because when we click on the button, we want to trigger an action. What are we going to trigger? Well, we are going to send the applicant a welcome message. We're going to do that on Gmail. So, we're going to send that from my Gmail account. Choose an action event. What do we want to do? We want to create a draft. Why? Because having that additional control can be helpful. If you want to review the text, you already have the draft there. So, it will save you time, but you can have the final review and add your own unique touch or personalize it even more. So, we're going to choose create draft instead of actually sending the email directly. Create draft. I'm going to connect it. Continue. And now we see that Zapier already has some access to my account. Yes, I know. So, we're going to continue and provide access to Gmail as well over here. Now, we're going to continue. We need to craft this email to whom we're going to send it. We're going to copy someone, the subject, the actual body of the email, and many different parameters that we can customize. We're going to keep this simple for the example. Who are we going to send this to? Well, we need some field mapping over here because we need to customize this to send it to the person that we are approving. That would be this email over here, right? This email. So, where are we going to take the email from? We're going to take it from the Zapier table. But we don't have access to those fields now. Why? Because we need to finish configuring this over here. The setup is the trigger Zap button clicked. Now we want to configure this the table ID trigger button. And then we were going to test this field. Test the trigger. Okay, now it found some new records and we're going to continue testing our Zap with specific records. Let me I'm going to add information as a record so we can test it and send the email to myself. So I'm going to say Estania and I'm going to have my email over here. Okay, I'm not reviewed or approved. Okay, this is just some demo information over here. So now I'm going to find new records on the table and that's the record that I want to work with. So now I'm going to continue testing my Zap with this record that I selected. Continue with selected record. Now I can go to the second step that I was configuring. It's always helpful to start by configuring the trigger because then you're going to have the data available in the action. Now, let's go to create draft. Continue. We are back to where we started. Now, who are we going to send the email to? We need to have a dynamic field here. With the forward slash, we can have access to all the information from that table. So let's we're going to send it here to this demo my email that would be dynamically updated to the email of the person we are approving. Then are we going to carbon copy someone? No. Then the subject welcome to our publication. Then from this value by default is your primary email address. But you can select an alternative one. Then from name, this is all optional. So we're going to keep it as it is by default. You can change the body type from plain to HTML if you need to. The body in this case will be plain. Let's say congratulations. And we want to replace the name over here. We want to use the name over here. So I'm going to select the name. Congratulations. We're going to replace the name here. We are very glad to welcome you to this is just something quick that I wrote for the example. Welcome you to our publication. So you can type it with me if you're following the course. We were impressed impressed with your application and your writing style. We believe our readers will thoroughly enjoy reading your articles. Please take a moment to review our publication style guide and guidelines. We look forward to seeing your first submission. Best regards. In this case, it's going to be me. I'm going to address it personally as if I wrote the email. Hey, congratulations, Sisteria. We're very glad to welcome you to our publication here. This is going to be the name of the author that we are approving. And I'd really like to have this custom name over here. Awesome. So then we continue setting this up. The signature default signature delimiter. We're going to keep the default values. Label or mailbox attachments. We can also include attachments. Very important in case we want to attach the guidelines or include like any sort of documents that we need to include in that automated message. Remember that here we are only going to create a draft. So we can polish it afterwards. This is just saving us time with the automation. Okay. So, now continue. Now, we're going to test this step. And a draft was sent to Gmail about 0 seconds ago. Let's go to Gmail and let's check this out. Now, we don't see anything here because it is a draft. We need to go to our drafts. And we see this. Welcome to our publication. Congratulations, Stephania. We're very glad to welcome you to our publication. I can see the draft. I can edit it. I can improve it. I can add attachments. But it's already written everything that I needed. Like the 80% of the message is ready and I can adjust it as needed.

Now for the subject, I think this one should be customized. So I want to go back to my Zap and customize this one. Configure. And then for the subject, I can also add this dynamic field. Welcome to our publication, comma, and I want to have the name here. Let's see if this works. I'm going to edit it. I'm going to continue and then I'm going to test the step again and see if this works. I'm just showing you also like the iterative process of how you can go back and refine what you've already created. Now, you go back to the email and now you see this over here. We have a second draft. Welcome to our publication, Estania. Congratulations, Stephania. We're very glad to welcome you to our publication. Really awesome, right? Okay. So, let's publish it and only when the Zap associated to that button is published, we can start like using the button on the table. Okay. So, now if I go back to the table, I can go to this button and now I do see approve. Yes, if I try to edit the field, I can see that it is associated or linked to this Zap author applications Zap one which is on. So we can use it and if I need to go to that Zap 2 to edit something or change something, I click here on the arrow and I go there to the editor.

Now let's say that I want to approve. Let's say who do we want to approve? Well, this record, this one grant has not been approved. Or Nora, Nora hasn't been approved either, the first record. So, let's check Norah's application. Let's say that we also got some information from her. Maybe in some one of these fields could be a link to a portfolio or to a sample article that they want to submit. We reviewed it and then we want to approve it. Now we are going to click here on approved and you will see how this will automatically trigger the Zap. Last clicked by me. Now the button is disabled, disabled. We can't approve it again. Now approved. And now if we go to our Gmail account, you can see this draft. Welcome to our publication, Norah Smith. It's taking the full name, customizing the subject. Now we see congratulations Norah Smith. We're very glad to welcome you to our publication. If you want, you can separate the name from the the first name from the last name. That's totally up to you. You can customize it well, however you'd like. But we have the draft here that you can customize. And it is addressing it to the right person. It is creating a draft, not sending the emails. So, it's keeping your workflow under your control, but it's still saving you time.

Now if we want to share the table because the tables can also be shared. We go here to this button share. With a free account, you can create public links that anyone with a link can have access to. It is telling you that while they discourage search engines from indexing shared tables, the link may still be publicly accessible if it is shared. So, create a sharable link. We're going to create a public link and you can choose if it's view only. Well, right now this is the only option. You can copy it to the clipboard and then you can share it with your teammates so they can see and have access to the data but in a view only way.

It's also important to note that when a field has an automation linked to it, you will see this little like lightning symbol over here. One Zap was linked. You can also view linked Zaps over here by clicking on the field and see a summary of the Zaps. If you need to have another Zap associated to another field, you can click on the field and then create Zap. You can configure your automation as well. Let's go. This is different from the button. We're creating a Zap for a normal checkbox field. Now, if the record is updated, this is a different trigger. Notice this. We are not using the same trigger as before when we had the button. Now the trigger will be that the record is updated. Okay, you can do something with one of your applications. This is really up to you and your workflow. This really depends. For this example, I was focusing on the button, but you can implement this type of functionality for any field. When you connect the Zap to that field, you will have this trigger, update record. When the record is updated, you can trigger a specific action depending on your needs. Following basically the same process that we've been following so far. Awesome. So, now you know how to use Zapier tables. Great.

So now that you know how to use Zapier tables and how to connect them to automations, let's check out more options that you can use to customize your fields and how you organize your records. You can see that here we have the Zapier table that we've been working with with the same fields. Now if you click on one of these fields, you will see additional options. We've used some of them, but let's check them out one by one. Here we have the option to sort in ascending or descending order. We can also insert a field before or after the specific field that we're clicking on. That would be to the left or to the right. We can also create a Zap and connect it automatically to that field and view linked Zaps. And finally, we have permissions. This is also very helpful to protect your data. You can lock a field, you can hide a field, and I will show you how that is related to views and you can delete a field. Let's see them in action one by one.

First of all, sorting. You can sort the records based on a field in ascending or descending order. So let's say that you want to sort the records by country and you want to sort them in ascending order. For a text field, that would be alphabetical order, like this, for example. In that case, you would see this little up arrow next to the field's name. You can also click on it again and change that to descending or you can clear the sort and just keep them in the order that they were added to the table. Awesome. In this case, let's sort the records by name in alphabetical order. That would be ascending order. Here we can see the little arrow. Let's keep this sorting for now.

Then let's click on username again and let's check out this one. Insert before or insert after in our table. Right now, we are capturing some of the most important information of an applicant, right? But we are missing something very important that would be the portfolio link or the submission for the application. Like if a person is applying to write in a publication, they will probably have some sort of submission for that publication, like an article that they've written before. So in this case, we're going to click on username and insert after, that would be to the right. The field name in this case is going to be portfolio. You can customize this. Maybe this could be article submission, whatever you think it's best. The field type will be text. The alignment will be left and we create it. Awesome. Initially, when we create the field, it will be empty for the existing records, of course, because they didn't submit that data. And now we have a new field. Just so you know, this new field is not visible in the views. If you add it after the views have been created, it will be hidden by default. And we will talk about hidden fields in just a moment.

Now if we click on username again, let's we well, we already covered the how to connect a Zap. We did that with the example. So now let's go to the permissions. We have lock field and hide field. Lock field is helpful to protect the values in that field. If you hover over this information icon, you will see that locked fields prevent accidental edits in the table's UI and are not a security feature. API modifications are still possible. So basically, this is telling you that you won't be able to edit the data of the records in that particular field. However, API modifications, which is something a bit more targeted towards developers and application development, well, that particular modification is still possible. So this is only preventing changes here in the user interface that you can interact with online. But it's still very helpful. Let's say that you don't want to change the username. So you can lock that field. And if you do that, you will see this little lock icon on that field. And if you click on the values, you won't be able to edit them. Notice the difference between this field and this field where we can edit the data. And basically, we can delete it by accident and that could be problematic in the future. So locking the fields is helpful. If you want to unlock them, just click on them and then unlock field. Awesome.

And now let's talk about hiding fields. Hiding fields is particularly helpful when you're working with views. Remember that we have two views created over here: Reviewed applications and Approved applications. Let's go to Reviewed applications. Let's say that since these are all the reviewed applications, we already know that the reviewed field will always be checked. So that is redundant information that we don't really need in this particular view. To keep the data as helpful as possible, we can choose to hide the field by clicking on it and then we click on hide field. Now we don't see the field here in the view. But if we go back to the table, we do see the field over here. So we're basically customizing the view to fit our needs. To check the hidden fields again, you can click here on three hidden fields. That would be the number of fields that you have hidden right now. And here you can choose if you want to display the field. In that case, you would check those checkboxes. Or if you want to hide it, and in that case, the checkbox would be unchecked. Now you can see here that the portfolio field is also hidden. If you want to display it, you can click on it. This is because the field was created after the view was created. It wasn't displayed by default. You can see it over here. And you can also move it and readjust it as you see fit. In these options, you can also show all or hide all if you want to as well. This is a shortcut. You can access this on the left sidebar where you can see the little crossed eye, hide fields.

And finally, if you want to, let's say, stop tracking a particular field, you want to delete all the data in that field, you just click on it and then you click on delete field, like this. This will permanently delete your field. You would click here on delete. In this case, I'm not going to delete the field, but if you click on it, you will be deleting it. Awesome. Now you know more about the options that you can use to work with fields in Zapier tables.

Now let's talk about Zapier forms. Forms in Zapier are helpful because you can create the form within Zapier and then directly connect it to a Zapier table that you just learned about to store the data that was submitted on that table and then connect it to different automations. Click on create, then forms. With the forms, you will have like this onboarding screen. Start building your form or you can start another way. You can start from an existing table or from a blank form. Let's describe our form: feedback form to collect the full name, email, and feedback of our users. So, I'm going to generate the form and then I'm going to tweak it and edit it as needed. Getting the form ready, taking you to the new form. You might have to wait a few seconds while it's creating the form, but you should get something initial. You can also always start with a blank form. I'm going to show you how you can edit and add fields. Okay, so now it's asking me if I want to build with Copilot. Create a feedback form that collects full name. Collects the full name, email, and feedback of our users. I'm using Copilot for this. Let's see what it can come up with. Full name is a text field. Email is an email field and feedback is a long text field. We can optionally connect the form to a Zapier table to automatically store all submissions in an organized database. Would you like me to create a Zapier table? Yes, create the Zapier table, please. Okay, so it's going to create a table and a form and the table, the fields on that table are going to match what's on the form. It says that it created the feedback submissions table with three fields. Okay, so now we see what it has come up with. The three fields on the form. They have a standard like style. All form submissions will be automatically saved to your table. When users submit the form, they will see a thank you for your feedback message. And now it is asking us about the next steps, but we're going to go more more slowly here because I want to show you how you can edit it and how you can add more fields to it. So I'm going to close Copilot.

We have the foundation feedback form. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Full name. You can see that when you hover over the fields, it's highlighted. If you click on the field, you can change the field name. What you see over here, you can change the type. It's already chosen like um initial field types for us based on our description. We can change that. The label as well, the max length, how many characters we want as the max, a placeholder text. If we want, for example, this text, for example, John, you can see that this is like lighter and giving the user an idea of the type of answer that we're expecting. And then help text as well. Maybe your full name. This is like an additional hint on what the field actually represents, but in this case, that is pretty straightforward. So I don't think we need that. Then a default value in case it's not required. And here we have options like required and hidden. If we uncheck required, it's not required. And now reference ID. This is a reference ID must be unique within the form to identify the data. This is for the field settings. It's the same for all the fields you will see. But uh for emails, you will also see additional options over here. In addition to required and hidden, you will see block free email providers and restrict emails to specific domains. Then we can edit the form as a whole by hovering over the form and then selecting edit. Here we see feedback form. We see the subtitle over here. The subtitle and the title. Then the fields. If we want to add a field, we can add it over here. Create a new field. Let's say that we want to ask for that user's username on our platform. That would be let's say you would choose yes, short text I think works great. We have many different types of fields over here, even an AI field. Then label, max length, the placeholder, add your username. It is required. Well, yes, let's make it required. Then create the field like this. Your username. If we want to edit it, the field name in the table will be username over here. Let's check out the table that it has created and see if it's being updated in real time as we add the fields. Let's see. We see that it is being updated. We see full name, email, feedback, and username. Awesome. Username, the one that we added here.

If we want to change the order of these fields because I don't want username to be here below feedback, I can go back to edit the main edit option for the form and then drag this one, this field, and then move it up where I want it to be. I want it to be the second field. Full name, username, email, and feedback. Awesome. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe we make the username or the full name optional just to have one optional field. I'm going to edit full name and I'm not going to make it required. Just with the username, we can identify the account, right? Okay. So, it's saving in real time without having to save manually. And I have my form. Yes, I can also add a field over here with this option. There we go.

Now once we have the form ready, we can go to page options over here as well. If we want to change the page options, page name, metatitle, this will be displayed in browser tabs and form navigation when enabled via the settings. We also see the page URL. Instead of page, we can feedback. We can write feedback over here. Feedback. Feedback. Let's change this and save the changes. And here we also see some options that you should be aware of. They're really, really tiny icons. Here we see the page. Let me zoom in so we can see this better. We see pages because this can have multiple pages. We see linked assets because we have a linked table. Feedback submissions, a Zapier table. We also see integrations settings. This is like the most common one that you will need to edit if you want to customize the settings. The name, this will be displayed in your form when navigation is enabled via settings. So, I'm going to change this to feedback. Public name. This is what the end user sees and can be different than its name in Zapier. It's optional. The subdomain, it's unique and it is required and you have one generated by default but you can customize it and the homepage. Awesome. So now our form is basically ready and we see the button to submit feedback.

Now if we want to customize this button, we can also customize the text on this button. Customize feedback button text over here. We just need to click on the form itself and then we change this button text. If we want submit instead of submit feedback, we can change that and it will be updated automatically. We also have this over here actions. When we have the button selected, actions. When a user submits this form, show a notification. Thank you for your feedback. That is what the user will see. We can also add another action with the trigger of form submission. Run Zap, navigate to another page, navigate to an external URL, show a notification, or run Zap. And you can also create a Zap from here just like you learned in the previous sections. It will just be connecting that to the form submission trigger. And the data here is connected to the table feedback submissions. You can view the table from here. This is all while we have the feedback form selected. Awesome.

Now let's share the form by clicking here on share. And let's test if we actually get the data from the submissions on that table automatically. We see editors because I am the owner. We see that I am the owner. Anyone at personal account will have no access. Then we see link over here. This is the link to the form. I'm going to copy it and then I'm going to open it in a different tab with Gino Smith. Username goithacample.com and feedback. This is a type of feedback that everyone loves, right? I love your application. It's awesome. Okay, so let's check this. Yes, it looks great. It looks great. It looks good. So now submit. Now when we submit the form, we see this. Yay. It's automated. We have the submission already like there on the Zapier table and it was added automatically when we received the form. The form submission. Now we see the full name, email, feedback, and username. And if we had another field over here like a button or something or if we had this field connected to a Zap, once we had that new record, the automation could be triggered and you can perform whatever you need to with that data in your workflow. So by connecting all these built-in tools, you are saving yourself a lot of time. And this is basically how Zapier forms work. There is a lot to customize and you're welcome to experiment with this to fit your own needs and your workflows. Awesome.

Now, we're going to talk about AI agents. Yes, artificial intelligence agents. What are AI agents? They're basically more powerful artificial intelligence. You can think of them as tools or assistants that can actually analyze resources. They can analyze the context in a deeper way, in a way that they can actually make decisions and categorize things and they have a deeper understanding overall. What are the differences between the AI agents and the automated workflows that we have been using so far? Well, in the automated workflows, we basically instructed the platform to do exactly the same thing every single time, right? Like when you had to copy or transfer information from one application to another, you would do that exactly the same way every single time. However, with AI agents, you unlock a whole new level of power because they can understand the context and the resources more broadly and they can also analyze it and make decisions based on their analysis. So when you have a task that needs some sort of deeper understanding of the resources that it's handling, AI agents can be exactly what you need.

So now let's go to create our first AI agent. And we click on create. And now we go to agents. We see this quick onboarding screen. Welcome to agents. Take a tour. Build an agent with just one prompt. Yes, we will be writing and refining our prompt. And we will also have the Zapier Copilot to help us see your agents progress and step in when needed. Take our new. They also have a Chrome extension. So you can just get started creating your first agent. Now when you click here, you will see different options. You can create a custom agent or you can start from a template. This can also give you some ideas of the kinds of tasks and workflows that you can automate with AI agents. For example, SEO analysis, inbox categorizer, Gmail auto replier, Gmail event creator. They're very powerful. So, what we're going to do here is similar to this one, the inbox categorizer, but I'm going to show you how to do this from scratch without starting from the template, but it's going to be very similar. We're going to trigger this AI agent to work on demand, like when we ask that agent to run. But you can also select different triggers if you want to, based on different events uh that happen on external apps, like similar to the automated workflows. For example, when you get a new email, when you add a new row to a spreadsheet, you can select that as a trigger as well. For now, we're going to keep this on demand. Then we're going to write this prompt. This prompt is basically the set of instructions that the AI agent should follow. And within those instructions, we have something called tools. Tools are basically the actions that the AI agent is authorized to take on the application that you're connecting to. In this case, that's going to be Gmail. And you can also add a knowledge base that we're going to see in just a moment. Instead of using the template, we're going to create a custom agent. We can describe what we would like the agent to do. So we can like have an initial foundation for the AI agent thanks to the Copilot. But I'm going to skip this step right now and I'm going to go directly to the agents dashboard. You can think of it like this. Here we have a way to select the trigger, write the instructions, choose the tools, and then the knowledge sources. If we want to see Copilot, we just click here and Copilot is here to help us build our our AI agent. It can also help you to refine the instructions.

Now, let's choose the trigger. The trigger I'm going to choose on demand, but you have different options. You can choose a schedule for triggering the AI agent. This is exactly the same as the automated workflows. It could be every week, every month, every day. You have trigger via Zaps and MCP. MCP is basically a way to connect your artificial intelligence, your AI tools with external context from other applications. And you can also choose triggers from other apps. For example, in Gmail when you get a new email, in Google Calendar when you have an event, all those different types of triggers still apply. Now, we're going to choose on demand. So that we will need to log into Zapier and then we have a very quick way to run the AI agent and start the whole process.

Now the instructions, we need to write the instructions. I already have some instructions here that I wrote previously, but we might need to refine them a little bit with Copilot and they're based on the template that we got for the inbox classifier. First of all, I'm going to rename this agent to email categorizer. We're going to categorize emails in this example. We're going to basically assign labels to them. Let me write this. When I ask you to categorize emails, do the following. Okay. So, what are we going to do here? We're going to retrieve the unread emails from our inbox, our Gmail inbox. All the emails that are currently unread. Retrieve all unread emails from my inbox using and this is a tool that you will need to choose. You will go to Gmail and then there is a tool called find email. This finds an email message based on your description. This is basically authorizing the AI agent to go to Gmail and find a specific email. In this case, all unread emails. Then we want to analyze the content of of the email and determine the most appropriate categories based on here. Should be plural, the content of the emails and determine the most appropriate categories or the content of each email and determine its most the most important categories based on its content. This could be important if the email contains topics of high priority. This could be to-do if the email contains tasks or act actions that I will need to complete and a bug if the email contains a bug or issue report. I'm going to keep this at three and then we're going to add one with the Copilot so you can see how you can modify the instructions with Copilot. Now apply the selected labels to the email using. Okay, now the agent needs permission to assign a label. That is another tool. We go to Gmail and add label to email. This will be added here automatically within the text. The AI agent will usually intelligently decide when each tool is helpful based on your instructions. Okay. If a label doesn't exist yet, create using. And that is another tool that we need, Gmail create label, like this. Email belongs to multiple categories. Apply multiple labels. We should be very specific, but we can always refine this as we test it. And then for testing purposes, provide a brief explanation. Provide a brief explanation of why those specific categories were assigned to the email based on its content. Okay.

The trigger is on demand and we're asking for all unread emails. Right now, if I go to my Gmail account here, you can see that I only have two unread emails. Two unread emails. One is a bug report and one is some an email that is reminding me of a meeting on Friday. I sent those to myself so we could like practice and see how this is working. Now, agent preview is where we test our agent. So let's test our agent and see what we get. We might need to expand this. It's testing the agent on demand now. So it says, "I'll start by retrieving all unread emails from your inbox to begin the categorization process." Now we if we expand this, we can see that it got two emails. We see the subject and a snippet from that email. And we see that it is actually getting the two unread emails that I have on my inbox right now. Now, email number one, it's categorizing it as a to-do. And email number two, it's categorizing it as a bug because it explicitly says a bug report. It's great because it's taking the context and the text and analyzing it and then it's making decisions. How should I categorize this email? That is a decision. And that's what AI agents are for, for more advanced decision-making processes. Now, it says that it's going to create the necessary labels and apply them to the emails. Right now, during the testing phase, it's asking for your permission before approving any actions. You need to approve this before the agent takes any actions during the testing process. Do we want to actually approve this action? Well, before we do that, let me go back before we actually assign the labels and let me add a new category or new label with Copilot. So I can show you how we can refine this description a little bit. Add a category called meeting for emails that mention or request that mention or request meetings. Now the Copilot will interpret this and let's see if it adds it here. It should add it right here at the bottom of the list after bug. Okay, it's saying that it's adding it. And yes, it did add it. Meeting if the email mentions or requests meetings. Awesome. So, it did follow the same format. It even added the hyphen over here and the description. So, let's go to agent preview now and let's test the agent again. We can click here to test the agent again with the new instructions with the four categories. Now again, we get the two unread emails: meeting on Friday and bug report. And this one is categorizing it as a meeting and this one is categorizing it as a bug. So let's create the label meeting. We approve it. It's creating the label. It created this label meeting over here. And now it's creating the bug label. I'm going to approve it. Now it's going to add the label to the email. Okay. So, we have the message here and the label is a meeting. Does it look good? Yes. I'm going to approve it. It's adding this label meeting. It's assigning the label. I'm going to approve it. And then it's finding emails. Okay. So, it's I'm going to approve it. Apparently, there was some sort of issue before. So, we couldn't apply the label. So, now now I need to approve it. And apparently, this is working. And now we need to add the bug label to the second one. And we're going to approve it. And it says perfect. I've successfully completed the email categorization workflow. Here is a summary. Meeting on Friday. It applied the meeting category. And bug report, it applied the bug category. And it also gave it gave me a reason for why it did this. Exactly what I asked here in bullet point number four, provide a brief explanation of why it was assigned to this category. Both emails have been labeled.

Now let's go to Gmail. And if we go to Gmail, we see these labels over here. It's really nice to see when it works, right? Right now, for bug report, we have the bug label. And for meeting, we have the meeting label. Awesome. Right now, let's open these emails. Let's read these emails. And now, since our agent is working correctly, we know that we have exactly what we want. So, now we can publish it. We can publish it by clicking here, unpublish, publish version one. You will also keep track of different versions of your agent as you make changes, just to make sure that you can go back to it if you need to. You can always unpublish the agent over here if you needed to stop. If you need to stop it. This is version one. You can see when it was published and this is the one that you're currently viewing. Now, we set this as an on demand trigger. So, let's go back with the arrow to my agents. And I see that I have one agent here. Now let's send me another email. I'm going to send an email Monday meeting, just a reminder that we will meet on Monday to discuss a critical bug on the application. Just as an example, simple example, let's see how the agent categorizes this email. Remember that we can assign multiple labels. So in this case, meeting might apply. In this case, it might be urgent because it's critical and it's also related to a bug. So, let's see how this works. I'm going to send this email to myself and I'm going to keep it on red. Let's say Monday meeting critical bug. So, now I have this one. It's unread. And

Since my agent will be triggered on demand, I can go here to my agents. Then click here on more options. And I have all of these options to manage my agent. I can edit my agent, run the agent, I can add it to a pod. Pods are basically like folders that you can use to group related agents. You can also add your agent to folders, transfer the owner, share the agent, duplicate the agent because it's also easier if you need to have a similar agent, but just make a few tweaks, a few edits. And you can also delete your agent.

Now let's run our agent. You will see this over here. And now we can include a message which is optional or we can just ask the agent to run the email categorizer. Let's run and let's see what it does. Running the agent. I'll start by retrieving all unread emails. Now we see that we have this one which is Monday meeting critical bug. The categories to apply it. Look, it did exactly what we mentioned before that it multiple categories could apply. Meeting, bug, and important.

Now, it's creating those labels if they didn't exist before and it's applying that to the email. Now, it's doing everything on its own. I'm just supervising and seeing if everything is on track. I can also stop the process if I need to over here with the stop button. But now it has been completed. And I see that this email was processed from this email. And it applied the labels meeting and bug. And I see an explanation here. This email was assigned both the meeting and bug labels because it serves a dual purpose. It's a meeting reminder about a critical bug. The meeting label captures a scheduling aspect while the bug label highlights the critical issue that needs to be addressed. The email also had an important label applied by Gmail's system, which aligns with the critical nature of the bug being discussed. Awesome. So, Gmail already assigned the important label over here. So, Sapier was smart enough to know that the label was already there. So, it didn't have to remove it and apply it again. So, we just kept it. Awesome.

So, now if we go back to Gmail, let's see what we get. Now if we refresh this, if we refresh our inbox, we will see the categories bug and meeting. If we go here, we see inbox, bug and meeting. Awesome, right? This is also in the important category. So it was already labeled as important. Awesome. So our agent is working like we expected. AI agents might take some trial and error and some iterations to get exactly what you want to get them working exactly as you intended, but once they do, they're pretty helpful.

On my agents, you can find all your agents. On all activity, you can see the activity of your agents. Here you can see the different runs that I've had for email categorizer, the apps that were used, how many activities it had. You can also see your consumptions. I've already consumed 14 of my 400 activities for the month on my free plan. And this is the status. Some of them are tests, some of them are real runs. Then my activity and I see that one item needs action over here. This was a test. I can mark this as complete. Go to the chat or go to the agent as well. So this is all for triaging the activity and the action items.

Now let's create a new pod to show you how you can create a new pod over here. Create a pod to group your agents. I'm going to create a pod called email agents. All the agents related to my email. In this case, I'm labeling some emails. Maybe I want to do something else with my emails. And I have this pod over here. I haven't added any agents to this pod yet, but I can add an agent. I can add an existing agent here or create a new agent. I'll add an existing agent. Email categorizer. Add one agent to pop. And you can see this over here in email agents. I have this agent. I also see all the activity related to the agents in this pot. I can refresh this. I can filter by status, by agent, and refresh to see the latest information. I can also add an agent directly here, an existing agent, or create a new agent on this pod. And I can also delete the pod over here. In additional options, it's very helpful to group agents by their similarities and functionality, similar to folders. And that's basically how AI agents work in Zapier. Remember that there are thousands of external apps that you can connect. We're covering the fundamentals of how you can get started with these AI agents. So, let's continue. We still have exciting features to cover that can help your workflow.

Now, I'm excited to show you a tool where you can create diagrams, visual representations of your workflows, and find opportunities for automation or actually represent your automated workflows in a visual way. You can think of this tool as a sort of like a flowchart tool, but for automation and more advanced. It's customized as well because it has the Zapier assets that you can use. We go to create and then canvas process visualization. You can get a system recommendation with AI. Describe what you're building and it will give you a head start, but I'm going to do that manually so I can show you all the different things that we have here, the different elements. You know that there's always co-pilot there on the sidebar on the left. For now, we're going to close it. You can open it again here at the bottom left. The options here on the canvas are at the bottom. You can see that it's basically sort of like a graphic tool where you have different types of cursors. You have the select tool, you have the hand tool. The hand tool is helpful for moving the canvas around and you also have the connector tool because you will be connecting different elements to represent the flow of the workflow.

Now let's go back to the select tool and let's choose one of these elements. This is a default step. This is a split path. Basically, a split path is when you have to split the workflow by making a decision. Should this happen or should this happen? I'm going to show you this graphically. It's bit like a conditional in programming. Then we see text over here because you can add text to describe certain steps in the workflow if you need to. You also have a group element so you can group different steps if you need to in your diagram and you can embed a link as well. Then you have the sapier assets the sub the table the form the chatbot and the agent. This is helpful to represent where you're using those elements in your automated workflow where where they fit in the grand scheme of things in the general bird's eye view of the workflow.

Okay. So let's add a new step by clicking here and then dragging it somewhere here on the canvas. And you can see that it it basically pops up and you can see these options. What should we build? You have the option here to explain the step and this is telling us that this is an empty canvas node. This is an empty placeholder node on your canvas. You can add a sub table, form, agent or chatbot to this node to build your workflow. Click to select and configure. Okay, so we can edit the color of this specific node. We can also add an app. Let's say that I'm going to represent my current workflow. I'm going to choose Google Drive here because my workflow, let's say, starts with Google Drive. Okay. Now, I have a step title here. Upload cover image to drive. Here I have the option to embed link. I can also add a note if I'm working on a team or for myself to understand what this step involves in the workflow. I can write that here. I can also remove the step by clicking here. I can add people involved in that specific step. I can type or search people people if I'm working on a team. And I have more options here title and notes. If I need to add another step before this one, I click here. If I need to add another step, I can click here. If I click here, I can add a step. I can suggest a step or I can split path.

Remember the online publication that we talked about? It was fictitious and we used it as an example for the sapier tables. Well, we're going to use it here as well. Let's say that I am designing the covers, the cover images for the articles that we publish on that publication. Currently, this is my workflow. So I'm going to upload the cover image to my drive and then I'm going to add it to a Google sheet. So I'm going to add a step here and this will be associated to I am scrolling with the middle mouse wheel here to move and I'm going to search for Google Sheets. I click on it and if I want to move the canvas completely I can change to the hand tool and by left clicking I can drag it and reposition it. I can also change the zoom here to zoom out or zoom to fit. I really like zoom out in this case. I think it's very helpful. Okay. So now what are we going to do? We have to customize the second step and describe it. add cover image information to the spreadsheet. Okay, so these are my two steps. Now, after that, let's say that I have another step in the workflow, but I'm going to add it here with one of these basic notes. Review the cover image. This is done by another team member. Let's say uh this is not related to any particular app but it happens on Google Sheets. So I can related to Google Sheets review the cover image. Now if I want to connect these two I can click on these little black dots over here circles and connect the two of them. So I can see the flow of the workflow like this. You can see the arrow pointing towards the right. Review the cover image.

Now after the review, there will be a decision right. Will the cover be approved or not? Well, I can split path like this. This is equivalent to adding one of these. And you can see that this would be approved or not. The conditional for this step would be approve cover image. The step label would be yes here and no here. You can see that they are added over here. You can see that it's very similar to a flowchart. Now if it is approved, we will publish it. We will publish the article. If not, then we will go back to the beginning. Basically redesign the cover. Now I want to connect this one to this one over here because we need to start all over. And I can reposition this so it looks a bit better. Of course, this is just representing a small part of the workflow. I could also start with like getting an article from the email from a volunteer or or the author, then actually contacting me uh who is in charge of creating the images, then working on the images, then uploading to Drive. But I'm choosing just to represent a small subset of that whole workflow. You can make this as complex as you need to, but I want to show you some of this so you can understand the different elements that you can work with in Canvas.

Now if we need to group some of these steps, we can use the group tool. Group over here. You will just drag it and this will create a group that you can resize as needed. You can change this to include as many or as little steps as you need. Let's say that you want to group only these two steps to refer to them as the review process. Review process. There we go. We have the review process. And you can change the colors. Let's make it purple, blue. Okay, let's make it blue so you can see it a bit better. You can change this. And you can also remove this with the trash icon over here. You can remove a step at any time if you need to by clicking on more options and then remove. Okay, these are the basic elements. Now, the connector tool is something that we haven't mentioned. The connector tool basically shows you where you can connect your steps to other steps. For example, let's say that I want to connect this one with this one. I can just drag the the point the little circle over here and it creates a connection automatically. If I want to remove one of these connections, I just click on it and then I press the delete key on my keyboard and that will remove the connection.

Awesome. Now, this graphical representation of the workflow can also give you ideas for how you can use or incorporate the different sappier elements or automations into your workflow. For example, this part of the workflow where we review the cover image and approve that image and then we make a decision based on this is a very good candidate for a Zapier table as well. Instead of using a a spreadsheet, a Google sheet, we could use a sappier table and have a button to approve the cover image or not and then let the graphic designer, the person in charge of that, redesign the cover if needed. All of this could be automated with Zapier tables. We could also automate this process of uploading the cover image to drive and then adding that information to the spreadsheet. Maybe we could replace this step with a SAP. Let me delete this and then replace this with a SAP over here. If we add the SAP and then we remove the connection. Now we're going to connect Google Drive to Google Sheets. And this step will be in the middle. You can link an existing sub or you can dis describe your sub. Your sub would be copy key information from the cover image file on drive. Or instead of copy, we could say add key information from the cover image file on drive to Google Sheets. or it could be a sap year table if we decide to make that change. Then once we have that in the workflow, we can link an existing sub or we can create a new SAP as well. But this tool is allowing us to think about this and analyze where automation could fit into our workflow.

Here we have table. Let me show you what you can add. We have table, we have form, we have the chat bots and we have the agents. So basically you can represent all of these in the diagram and then implement them in the platform. If you select multiple steps, another thing happens. You can you can choose between these options. Auto layout for the selected steps and auto layout for the selected steps. The difference here is left to right or top to bottom. If you have a more complex workflow and you'd like to arrange this better visually, it can help you. You can also rename your canvas here. Let's say cover images workflow. You can add a description and you can also delete it. And you can share it by sharing a public link that you can generate. It's view only and those who do not have access to the to your Safier account can see it but they can't edit it. Generate a public link that you can then copy and paste and send it to whoever needs to see this diagram. And before we finish, there is one more element that you should know about is that you can add text. If you need to add some sort of text over here, you can add it. Maybe this could be a comment, a to-do. Maybe this could be automated. You could add comments here. You could add comments for yourself, for your team, or comments or text that should be in the final diagram. You can format it with different text color like this. Let's keep it black. You can change the font size. You can format it as a heading, heading one, heading two, bold, itallic, underline, strike through. You can also format it as code and insert a link. Create a bulleted list, an ordered list, a task list, basically with check boxes. Let's say item one, item two, item three. You can have the check boxes. You can have bullet points, you can have numbers, and you can also change the background color of the box and make them look like those little like sticky notes that you would keep in the diagram. And these are very helpful as well to create the diagram exactly like you envision. And with that, now you know how to use sap your canvas.

Great work so far during the course. Now, we're going to dive into chat bots that will help you brainstorm video ideas. How does that sound? So, let's dive in. First of all, before we begin, I want to mention that you may notice some differences here in the homepage of Zapier. When you log into your account, Zapier is a platform that is constantly evolving. So you may see some small differences compared to when we started the course and now because they've implemented some changes. For example, you can find this search bar over here at the top. And you can also see that this is now called templates instead of discover. You can also see that when you click on assets, you will see a drop-down menu with all the different options that you have for these assets. It's like a pre filter. If you click on any one of them, you will go to the same user interface that you had before. Awesome. So, with that said, we can continue to our chatbot. Let's click here on create and then chat bots. With your free account, you can create up to two chat bots. New chatbot. Let's name this chatbot video ideas assistant. This chatbot will be like a content creation specialist that will help us to brainstorm titles and different like topics and twist for our video. So let's create it video ideas assistant. When you create the chatbot you will reach this user interface. First of all you can see that we have a greeting here. This is how the chatbot will greet the user. You can customize it and we'll do that in just a moment. But we're going to do that based on this which is like the core of the chatbot. The directive. The directive is basically the instructions that the chatbot will follow, how it will say communicate with the user, what it should be good at, what it should know about, and any other rules that you would like to specify about the conversation and the interactions.

So, we're going to customize this I'm going to copy paste a directive that I already wrote and prepared with the help of other AI tools that helped me refine my initial ideas. That is a great thing about this that you can start with a very general idea of what you want the chatbot to be and then use other tools to help you other LLM tools to help you refine this even further and be more specific. So, let's go through what I've written here to see how we're going to customize the chatbot. Going to zoom in so you can see this better. Well, we're going to keep the Zapier directive structure. They divide this into objective into style and other rules. So, we're going to keep that. I think that's a good structure. Now, for the objective, you are an expert video content strategist and creative consultant. Your goal is to help creators brainstorm video ideas that maximize engagement and reach. Users will give you the topic of the next video they are planning to create and optionally a description of the target audience. For every request, you must provide five engaging titles. Those could be in lower case. Five engaging titles designed for high click-through rate. a concise explanation of the video's core value, who this video is for and why they would want to watch the video, and this is very important, a unique angle to make the video stand out from similar videos. You can see that this part, this part of the directive, the objective is basically telling the chatbot what it should know about, what it should be good at. When you're working with these AI tools, you'll notice that they are very very good at roleplaying. If you give them enough detail about what they should know about and what they should be experts in, they will give you more detailed and precise output. So that's basically what we are doing here. Then we go to style. Style is basically how you want the chatbot to communicate its knowledge. Your communication style is energetic, visionary, and encouraging. Think of yourself as a creative partner. That's what we want the chatbot to be, a creative partner for the person who is using the chatbot. Use structured formatting, including headers for different concepts, bold text for emphasis on key hooks. this one. Well, we don't really need the quotes here. Bullet points for readability and emojis to maintain a high energy creative vibe. I really love this one because I love emojis. So, I wanted to include emojis. And here we see other rules. If the user mentions a specific platform, for example, YouTube or Instagram, customize the titles and descriptions to the specific style and length constraints of that platform. that is important. In this section, we basically write everything that doesn't really fit in the objective section or the style section. Basically, other rules that the chatbot should still follow. If a user asks for technical help, for example, how do I fix my camera or how do I set up my camera? Something like this. Just a simple example so the chatbot knows exactly what we are referring to. kindly redirect them back to the creative process of video ideation. Okay, you can see that I'm still refining this one. And finally, if the ideas don't quite hit the mark, ask the user what specific elements they want to change to refine the next batch. This is a directive that I started writing as a very simple prompt and then I gradually through an iterative process with an LLM I reached this level of detail. I also provided the Zapier original directive as an example. I said keep the structure but adapted to my particular needs and there is where I described that I wanted a chatbot that would help users brainstorm video ideas for different platforms. So after that I refined the directive. I also customized it and I reached this final result. I'm going to scroll down slowly so you can pause the video at any moment if you would like to write this on your own chatbot if you would like to have exactly the same prompt or directive that I'm providing here. Awesome.

So now I'm going to save the changes. If we save the changes now, the chatbot will be customized to follow that directive. Now I want to generate a custom greeting because how can I help you today is a little bit too generic in my opinion. I'm going to generate a greeting with AI by clicking here. Now instructions to generate your greeting. Generate the greeting based on the directive I provided for this chatbot. Generate the greeting based on the directive I provided for this chatbot. Generate. And here we go. Hey there. Ready to brainstorm some I don't like the word killer, but ready to brainstorm some video ideas that will skyrocket your engagement. Let's create something amazing together. I like it. Well, let's keep it. Let's keep it. It's just an example. So, we're going to save the changes. And now you can see that the greeting has changed. We did say that we wanted the chatbot to be energetic, right? I think it was here. Yes, energetic, visionary, and encouraging. And I think this greeting really reflects that.

Now that we have the greeting customized and the directive, we can check out some of the different options that we can have in the chatbot. We can restart the chat with the chatbot over here by clicking on this button. We can also preview the desktop version which is what we have by default or the mobile version of the chat as well if you ever need to change that. Then we see the options here in build. Instructions is where we're currently at. Then knowledge is not available in the free account but basically is for providing custom knowledge for the chatbot. If you have any sort of documentation or if you want to crawl web pages or connect it to other sources, you can provide that knowledge source. Then we have logic. The options that you can use with your free account are the SAP button to display a button that triggers ASAP, run SAP to trigger a SAP that will run automatically, schedule a meeting to display an inline calendar for scheduling, and suggestions to give users default prompts to use. I personally love this option. So, this is something that I'm going to show you in a moment. It's also possible to add integrations with the chatbot. So, the chatbot can respond to a post or social media messages directly on other platforms. Here in AI model, you can customize how creative the answers should be based on the current AI model. A value of zero represents very predictable. So you will basically always get the same answer when you send the same message. But random is a value of one and that's basically more creative. That's a more creative chatbot that can generate the answers more randomly. You can also reset it to the default which is 0.7. Then we see the settings. The public name of this chatbot user message placeholder. This is also very important because this is basically the text that you can see over here. Ask me anything. We're going to customize this too. I think ask me anything is a little bit too generic. Then we have a custom error message here that we can customize. It's a message that will be displayed if the chatbot encounters an error. Then the time zone, then the browser title subdomain that you can also customize. It's basically the public name that you have here but with hyphens. And those are the options that you have available in the settings. You can also review your conversations. It's new this chatbot. We just created it so we don't have conversations right now. And the analytics, we can go back to that later on.

Okay. So now let's send a message here just to test our chatbot before we start customizing it further. I'm going to send a message saying that I'm planning to create a video on drawing techniques for beginners. You can see that the answer is very customized to our to fit our needs to the directive that we provided here. Awesome topic. Drawing techniques for beginners is a fantastic niche with tons of potential to attract eager learners. Let's grab some video ideas that pull viewers and keep them hooked. We see five video titles. We here in the directive specified five engaging titles. You can change this number as you wish. Then we see the core value of the video, who the video is for, and then a unique angle to make it stand out. The chatbot is also continuing the conversation. Ready to take your drawing beginner video to the next level? want to tailor the ideas for YouTube, Instagram or Tik Tok, let me know. So, let's ask the chatbot to tailor the video ideas for YouTube. Now, it's giving us basically the same information, but tailored for YouTube and for the specific audience that we will find in YouTube. Awesome. So, now you know how to interact with the chatbot. Let's go to the settings a bit here and let's restart the chat to customize it a bit. Now I want to change the user message placeholder. Enter the topic of your next video. I'm going to save the changes. And now you can see that this has been replaced. Enter the topic of your next video. You can also write it as a question. This really depends on your style and what you want to do with your chatbot. But what's the topic of your next video? Okay, awesome.

Now, one thing that I love to customize is adding some suggestions here. Give users default prompts to use. If we click here, we can see that we can show suggestions at the beginning of the conversation or after every chatbot response. In this case, I'm going to show that at the beginning of a conversation. And these are optional, of course. You can remove them with a trash can. You can have one, two, or as many as you need. You can add suggestions by clicking here or remove them. So, let's add, let's say, two. And what are these? Well, they're basically like buttons that you're going to see here above the text input area that users can click on to send that message automatically. So, it's basically simplifying this initial interaction with the chatbot to get them started. Let's say what can you help me with in case someone is asking about like what the chatbot is helpful for and share suggestions for my next video just as an example. You can customize this however you'd like. So we're going to create the logic here at the beginning of the conversation. We don't want this after every response. So now you can see this customized. What can you help me with? And share suggestions for my next video. Let's test the first one. What can you help me with? Awesome question. Here's how I can supercharge your video content creation process. What I can help you with crafting video titles, defining your video's core value. Basically, it's telling that it can help with what we've set up in the directive. Okay. Why work with me? And it says that it's energetic, visioner, creative partner. Basically, what we've set it up to be. Awesome. If you want to modify these options at some point, you can go to logic here and then click on show suggested messages. That will take you to the options and you can just edit them as you wish and save them, of course. If you want to remove this logic, you can remove it over here with the button. Let's restart the chat and let's test our second option. And it's always important to test the chatbot to make sure that it's working correctly. Share suggestions for my next video. Now, absolutely to tailor the best video ideas for you. Can you share what topic or niche you're focusing on? I like this because it's a way to get people started. Even if initially they don't like provide the topic, the chatbot will ask for that topic or niche that they are focusing on. So, it's getting the conversation started and getting everything like ready to get the video titles and ideas. Awesome. You can also add additional logic here by clicking on add logic.

Now that we have our chatbot working, we can share it. Let's click here on share. And if we go here, we can click on public link. And then this is the public link. Anyone with the link can view. This is one option, one access option. Or you can have the public URL disabled as well. I'm going to have anyone with the link can view. And I'm going to click on the public link. I'm going to open it in a new tab. You can see the chatbot like this. So, what can you help me with? And I'm going to get that reply. what I don't do. I like that it's also clarifying what it doesn't do, like technical tutorials, like camera setup. But I'll always steer you back to making your creative vision shine. Awesome. So, it is working. Let's say that I'm planning to create a video on piano fundamentals. So, now we get those five title suggestions. The core value of the video, the unique angle. This can be helpful for brainstorming for content creators specifically.

Now, let's test our chatbot internally to see what happens if we derail a little bit from the topics that it can handle. Let's write something very general and out completely outside of the topic of the chatbot. How can I repair my laptop? Let's see what it replies with. Well, right now it's saying that awesome curiosity before it it's actually taking this as a an idea for a video title. So, we might want to refine this directive by adding something here. If the user asks about something unrelated to video creation, please kindly redirect them to this topic. Say that you're only meant to help with video ideiation. And so I'm going to change this and see how it works. Can you help me to repair my laptop? Okay, so you can see that this question is very like outside of video ideiation. So the chatbot has detected that I'm here to help you create amazing video content. Especially if you want to share your laptop repair journey with your audience. If your goal is to make a video about repairing laptops, just let me know your target audience and platform and I'll help you create those video ideas. But what kind of laptop repair video are you thinking about? Or do you want me to help you brainstorm ideas around tech repair content? I think this is working because it's kind of like subtly redirecting the question. Like the user asked something unrelated to video ideas, but the chatbot is saying, "Hey, I can help you with video content and if you want to make a video about this, I can help you with that." So we can ask. So you can only help me to brainstorm video ideas. Exactly. My superpower is helping creators like you brainstorm killer video ideas. Okay. So basically it's confirming them and it's not derailing from its purpose. That is very important that the chatbot will stay in its course. It will stay in its role and it won't answer any unrelated questions that the user might come up with. So let's restart the chat. And now we have finally our custom chatbot. Awesome.

Now let's review our conversations here. Now let's refresh this. If we refresh, we reload the page and we go to conversations. Now we can see this conversation. The free plan will give you access to the past seven days of chat history. So you can see that the conversation that we had on the link this this won't actually like record the conversations that you have here in the instructions. It will record the conversations on the public link. So this is the one that we had in the public link. Remember where we asked about video titles for piano fundamentals. So this is what we got. You can see how your users are interacting with the chatbot. You also see the date and the time. You can search for a specific conversation or you can also export your conversations. If you click on export, you can export all conversations. And if we go to analytics, you will see that here you can see how many conversations you've had in the past 30 days. And this percentage is the difference or the comparison of the past 30 days to the 30 days before them. Then we see how many messages were part of those conversations and how many URLs were clicked. Now you can see the days and you can see a graph of how many conversations the chatbot was engaged in in the past day in the past 30 days. You can also export this as a CSV weekly or daily. Awesome. These are the chatbot features that are included with your free account. Now you know how to create custom chat bots in Zapier.

And finally, one last tool that I want to show you that I think you'll find very helpful is the Zapier MCP. MCP stands for model context protocol. It's basically a protocol that we use to connect AI tools with external applications because AI tools, LLMs, large language models that power the chat bots that we use now, the tools like chat GPT, like cloud, like a copilot, they are all like in their tiny little world. Without an MCP, they can't actually know what is happening in our external apps. They can't take information from let's say our calendar or our email or documentation that we have stored in some documents that we have on our Google Drive or other tools. They can't know the context of our conversations or chats with other people. For that, we need a model context protocol and more specifically an MCP server. A model context protocol server. The server is what actually creates that connection and allows the tools to connect and share information. So that's what we're going to do in this final chapter. We're going to set up the Zapier MCP. And we're going to do that so we can connect to the MCP from Visual Studio Code. So are you ready? Let's dive in. Let's go to mcp.sapier.com. This is where you should go. You will see if you're already logged into your Zapier account, you should see it right here at the bottom left. And we see that Zapier MCP is currently in beta. So, it's still being tested. Some things might change in the future compared to when I'm recording the video, but overall the process and the ideas, notions, and concepts should be exactly the same. Okay. So we see creating your first MCP server to start connecting your AI assistants to thousands of apps on Zapier. Okay, new MCP server. Let's connect. Now we see popular clients cloud cloud codegpt cursor. We also see well open cloud python visual studio code typescript. I'm going to choose visual studio code this time. Now what will the MCP server be able to access? That is something that we have to configure. That is what we call the tools here. Add a tool. Add a tool to your MCP server to provide your AI assistant with abilities to perform actions. It's basically what we were doing very similar to what we did with the AI agents when we added the list of tools and we said what the AI agent could do with our emails. Remember the labels? Well, we're basically going to do that but for the MCP server. So, let's let's give access to my Google calendar. And I want to give access to let's see let's see let's see let's see in this case I want to find events on my calendar. It will return up to 25 matching events. Let's start simple. Let's click this find event and basically in the tool I'm going to be asking hey what uh meetings do I have scheduled right now you can do that with any client okay I'm just using Visual Studio Code as an example but you can choose different clients and the process and the result will be the same now I need to connect with Google Calendar I'm going to choose my account and I'm going to grant the permissions looking good Okay, now we see the account and of course we can manage it, connect to a new account and manage my accounts. But I'm going to add the tool here and I can see the tools related to Google calendar over here.

Now after I configured my first tool, I will see this prompt to connect to my MCP server with my AI assistant. So I click here and these are the instructions on how to connect vis to Visual Studio Code. Use tools directly inside of Visual Studio Code with Zapier MCP. Enable your editor to perform real world tasks through a simple secure connection without leaving your coding environment. You must have GitHub Copilot enabled and set to agent mode in Visual Studio Code for Zapier MCP to work properly. Okay. Configuring Zapier MCP. We can automatically configure this or we can configure it manually. I'm going to do it manually so I can show you the process. We first we open the command pallet. Then we select add server. Then we choose HTTP. Paste this URL. This one over here. We authenticate to the Zapier MCP via OOTH. And then we add tools and use them in agent mode. Okay. Here we are in Visual Studio Code and I have my work profile. And now I'm going to open the command pallet. I'm on Mac OS. So that would be commandshiftp or control shiftp if you're on Windows. And then I'm going to run mcp at server. This is the command that you want to run. MCP at server. Now we're going to select HTTP according to the instructions provided by Zapier. Connect to a remote HTTP server. Now we need to paste the URL that Zapier has just provided to us. Connect. And now we enter the server ID. And now we are activating the extensions. We want to authenticate to mcp.sapier.com. We're going to allow this. Do you want code to open the external website? This is for authorizing Zapier to exchange data through the MCP. So I'm going to open it. And now we see that Visual Studio Code wants to access my Zapier account. This will allow Visual Studio Code to access the following information. Access my Sappier account, see the full list of tools I've enabled, and run any tool I've enabled and see and store the results. Okay, so this is my account on Sapier. So I'm going to allow this. It was successful. So I'm going to open this. And now apparently this is correct. I am already connected to my MCP server. Awesome. Right. Then I can go to my chat co-pilot. Open chat. If you don't see the chat interface like I see over here with this icon, then you might need to install this extension over here. You search for Copilot in the extensions marketplace and then you go here to GitHub Copilot chat and then you will find this extension that you can install. This should give you access to the chat interface of GitHub copilot. and then make sure that you have this mode set up agent. Okay, so let's continue. You can see here that a new file was opened mcp.json and here I can see my new MCP server. You should see something similar to this. Now describe what to build. I'm going to choose the agent mode. This is what Zapier instructed. Sappir mentioned that we have to be in agent mode. And now I want to take data from the MCP. First of all, I need to schedule some events. I'm going to go here. This remember that this is a demo account that I created for the course. So I'm going to go to my Google calendar. Okay. So I'm going to create an event team meeting and I'm going to create that event. It's going to start from 5 to 6:00 p.m. today. And I'm going to save it. And then I'm going to change this to monthly. And I'm going to book another meeting. Let's say curriculum meeting. We're developing an educational curriculum. So let's say this over here. We have two meetings. Just my just me. Okay. Team meeting and curriculum meeting. Now, if Visual Studio Code has this context, when I ask a question in the chat, it should be able to know what I'm asking about. How many meetings do I have scheduled this month? It should be smart enough to know that it should go to the MCP to find this information. I'm checking your calendar across March in weekly chunks so I can count all the scheduled meetings without hitting result caps. Awesome. You can see that it is using the MCP server that we just configured with Zapier. And here we see the summary. You have two meetings scheduled this month on your default calendar. The team meeting on March 14th and the curriculum meeting on March 17. If you want, I can also break them down by week or list their exact times. Please list their exact times and let's see how powerful this can be. If it had access to the meeting, it should also have access to the details of that meeting. Now it's again using the server and we see their exact times from 5 to 6. And the other one, well, I didn't set a specific time, so it's happening all day. It's a very long meeting, so I would have to change that in my calendar. But it is amazing that it is having it's having access to my calendar thanks to my MCP that Sabia is powering the MCP server that we just set up over here. Remember that the usage of this MCP also has a limit on the free plan. You can have up to 100 uh tasks consumed by the MCP over here. Zero of two used tasks in this period have been through MCP. Your MCP usage counts towards your plan limit of 100. Okay, so this is global. 100 is the global limit of everything that you can do like in Zapier with a free account. But it is very powerful. You can set up your MCP server and connect to it. And depending on your client, you will have different instructions on how to get everything set up. But as you can see, it is quite straightforward. You will also need to authenticate with your Zapier account. And here you can also check your history all the actions. You can see the actions that we've triggered with our Visual Studio Code client. Here we are using Copilot. In the previous example, we set up a Zapier MCP server to get data from Google Calendar in Copilot within VS Code, Visual Studio Code. In this example, we're going to continue that, but this time we're going to get information or data from GitHub. If you're a developer, this can be super helpful to get information of of issues, pull requests, and repositories in general in your GitHub account or your organization. So, let's create a new MCP server. I deleted the previous MCP server that we had created before and I removed basically all the configuration from Visual Studio Code. So we're going to start from scratch. I'm going to add a new MCP server and I'm going to choose one of the clients that are available. In this case, Visual Studio Code. Now we see Visual Studio Code MCP server. We're going to add the tools that

We will need to use. Add tool. And this time, we're going to choose GitHub. What tools do we want to have access to? Well, we want to find a repository, find an issue, and we want to create a branch, but I'm not going to add this one yet. So, I can show you how to refresh your server in case you want to add tools later on while you already have that set up. So, I'm going to choose these two tools to get started. And I'm going to select my GitHub account over here. Add two tools. Awesome.

Now, I can see the tools listed here. And if I want to test them, this is something that we haven't seen before. Here we have the tool, right? So, let's click here on the three dots on the more options menu. And we can see configure, remove from the server. If we want to remove this tool, we can also check the history, how many times or when we have used the tool in the MCP server. And we can test it. I'm going to show you how to test it. This is helpful to know if we are actually doing exactly what we need to and the connection is okay before we set it up in the AI client. Describe in plain language what you want this tool to do for the test, of course. Show me information about issue one of the GitHub repository. So I'm asking the tool to show me information about issue number one. Maybe we can use the hash symbol here of this repository. Based on my experimentation, it's usually helpful to write the username here, the GitHub username and then the repository. So, we can be more specific and the GitHub repository. We're also specifying that it's a GitHub repository. So, we're going to check this preview only. Do not actually run the action to have a preview. And this will give us a preview of the parameters that it will infer from our instructions. It's trying to find something in this repository, which is correct. The state is all, search by issue number. That is great because we are specifying the issue number here and the number would be one. So we want to run the tool and see what we get as the output.

Over here, we can see execution ID, the instructions that we wrote, resolved fields, and this is the final output with all the data that we got as the reply. And we can see that we got issue number one and the title is "typo on the landing page." This is an issue that I created as a demo for the course and basically all the information associated to the issue. So that's great. We got the information and the test was successful. So we can close it now and it's working. We can also test find repository. That's something that you can experiment with to practice. So let's collapse this.

And now let's connect our MCP server to Visual Studio Code. We're going to do that manually here. We are going to go here to Visual Studio Code. I created a a folder, GitHub MCP demo, just in case, but you don't necessarily need to be inside any folder. You can do this even if you don't have a folder open in Visual Studio Code. Command Shift P to open the command palette and then we filter by MCP add server like this. Then we need to choose HTTP and we have to copy paste this URL like this. So we copy paste it and then it's asking us to enter the server ID. You can customize this. This is basically like the name of the MCP server internally that you will use in Visual Studio Code. So this could be Zapier GitHub MCP. Zapier GitHub MCP. Yeah, I think that will work. We can customize it later on. And we have to choose if we want to add the MCP server globally or for this workspace. Globally will be available in all workspaces. Workspace means that it will be available in this workspace, basically in this folder that we currently have open and runs locally. I'm going to configure it for this workspace in particular.

Now I see that Zapier the MCP wants to authenticate. So, I'm going to allow it. Allow. Now, open Visual Studio Code app. And there we go. Basically, we have the MCP. You can check that it's running because we have a check mark here next to running. You can also stop it or restart it or you can see more options here for that MCP server. And you can also see that since we only added the MCP server to this workspace, we have a .vscode folder here with MCP.json. And that is the information about the MCP server and how it's going to connect.

So now we're going to open the chat interface. Open chat. This is Copilot. Remember that if you don't see this option or the chat, you might need to install the extension. You can write Copilot and that will show you this GitHub Copilot chat. Install this extension and there you will see this option, this chat. You click here on the little chat icon and you can open a new chat. Let's expand this and describe this. Now, let's test the same prompt that we sent during the test. Show me information about issue one. In this case, I'm not going to use the hash symbol because the hash symbol in Visual Studio Code can be used to mention specific um tools, things that you might need to use. Show me information about issue one of the Stefania course team project GitHub repository. I'm going to send this and it should be smart enough to know that it should use the MCP server. We can always like add it with a hash symbol so it knows specifically that it should use it, but it should be smart enough to know it. And you can see that it is using this tool GitHub find issue. Awesome. It's running. We just need to wait for a moment.

And here we go. We got the information. "typo on the landing page." We have the description, the status, who created it, when it was created, the labels, assignees, comments, reactions, and the URL. And it's also telling us that the issue is still open and has no additional details. I love the summary that it's giving us. So we have all the context. Awesome. So we can get information about an issue.

Now let's say that I want to add a new tool. Let's say that I want to create a branch from my chat interface. How can I add this tool here? Well, I would go to my Zapier MCP server and add the tool over here. I would filter by GitHub and then I would find the tool that says create branch over here. Awesome. Create branch. I'm going to add it to the MCP server and I can see create branch. Now, what happens here if I try to use this? Well, it won't have access to the tool immediately because we previously set up the MCP server and it's running. We would need to restart it to get the new tool that we just added. So, let's do that here.

If you click on this little icon, you can see this little icon over here, you can check the tools that are currently available to you on the MCP here in Visual Studio Code. If you scroll down, you will find the Zapier GitHub MCP or the name that you assigned to it. And you can see that you only have these two tools right now: find issue and find repository. We don't have the third tool for creating a branch. So if we provide that prompt, if we write that prompt, it won't be able to create the branch. So how can we do that? We just go to the command palette with Command Shift P on Mac OS, Control Shift P on Windows and then we list the servers. When we list the servers, we will see our Zapier MCP. We click on it and there we see the option to restart the server. If we click on restart server, now we should see the new tool. We go to the tools again by clicking on this little icon over here. And now we see GitHub create branch. Awesome, right? So we do see the new tool and we can start using it.

If we don't want a specific tool to be available during a specific session, we can disable it temporarily here by unchecking the checkbox or unchecking the entire MCP here if we don't want the MCP to be available. But in this case, we do. So, let's click here and let's start a new session. We're going to ask Copilot to do something for us. Create a new branch called GitHub MCP test on the create a new branch called the GitHub MCP test on the Stefania course team project GitHub repository. Now let's see if this works. I'm going to send it and we should see our branch being created. We provided those permissions to the MCP server. Since it's going to edit information, it's asking for our permissions. So, I'm going to allow it in the session. And we see the tool that it's using, create branch from the Zapier GitHub MCP. Very important that it's using the correct MCP. The new branch has been successfully created. Yay! From main. And it's also giving us a branch. If we go to GitHub now, we can see the branch over here. GitHub MCP test. And it is working and it's based on the main branch. Awesome, right? We did that just by providing the necessary permissions on the MCP server and with a natural language just asking the Copilot to create that new branch.

Now you know how to create a Zapier MCP to connect GitHub to Copilot in Visual Studio Code. Awesome. Now in the next example, I'm going to show you how you can do exactly the same in Gemini CLI to show you how you can use the MCP server in a command line interface. I will see you then. Great. So let's go to Gemini CLI. First of all, we're going to create a new MCP server. I'm going to delete this one. You can delete the MCP server by clicking here on this trash can icon. Before we do that, you can check the history here as well to check the details of the interactions that the AI client has had with the MCP server. So, bye-bye to our Visual Studio Code MCP server. And now we're going to create a new one. You can have them simultaneously there, but I just want to delete the old one and create a new one.

Now, let's filter by Gemini. And we can do that with Gemini CLI. And here we have Gemini CLI MCP server. Now, we need to add the same tools that we had before because we're going to do basically the same. I'm going to show you how you can do exactly the same, just we're going to change the AI client. That's the only thing we're going to change. We want to enable these tools: find repository, find issue, and create branch, like this. Connect. Add three tools. Like this. Awesome. You can test them if you'd like, but we're going to jump right into connecting with Gemini CLI.

Now, let's go to our terminal and we're going to run this in the context of our GitHub MCP demo. I'm going to go to that path. In this case, to go to the path of this folder that I currently have open in Visual Studio Code. One quick way to do that is to right-click on the explorer, copy path, and then we change directory to this directory, GitHub MCP demo. Awesome. I'm going to run Gemini CLI. I'm assuming that you already have Gemini CLI installed. If you don't, you can go here to geminiscli.com and there you can install it with the corresponding command for your operating system. In this case, I already have it installed. So, I'm going to start Gemini by running the Gemini command. And it's asking me how I would like to authenticate for this project. I'm going to sign in with Google. Do you want to continue? Yes. You will need to authenticate with your email the first time that you authenticate. So maybe like get a code from Google Authenticator or any two-factor authentication that you have set up. So we're going to sign in. Authentication was successful. And I see that I successfully signed in with Google. Gemini CLI needs to be restarted. Press R to restart. So I'm pressing R here to restart it.

Okay. So now that I've authenticated with Gemini CLI, I'm going to start a new terminal just so you can see this in a new terminal window. I'm going to go again to the GitHub MCP demo directory where I was. And now I'm going to add the Zapier MCP server. Connecting Zapier MCP in Gemini CLI. I'm going to run this command in my terminal. going to copy and paste the command and you can see that the MCP server Zapier was added to the user settings, to my user settings. So now we want to start Gemini in the interactive mode by running the Gemini command. And here you can see that we are in the interactive mode and I need to run this command mcp of Zapier to log in. So I'm going to do that. mcp of s z Zapier. This is going to ask me to authenticate for using the MCP server Zapier. I'm going to press enter to continue. And there I get the same, the very similar authentication window. I'm going to allow this. And I see that the authentication was successful. You can close this window and return to Gemini CLI. So I'm going to close it and return to Gemini CLI.

Now if I run MCP list to list my configured MCP servers and tools, in the output now I see Zapier. It's ready and it has four tools available, including create branch, find issue, and find repository. Now let me ask something to Gemini CLI. So, we're going to ask the same things that we asked in Copilot and see if we get the same information. Show me information about issue number one of the this is the username and team project GitHub repository. Show me information about issue number one of this repository. Okay, awesome. Now we need to wait for it to fetch the information. Now it's asking for permission to use this tool, GitHub find issue. We can allow once, allow this tool for this session, or allow all server tools for this session. I'm going to allow once. You can choose the one that fits your needs. And now we see some results over here. And the output is this issue number one, "typo on the landing page." We see the state, the author, the body of the issue, and the labels. Awesome. We can ask more information if we need to, but it is having access to the issue.

And now let's ask it to create a branch called Gemini CLI MCP test on the Stefania course team project GitHub repository. Create a branch called Gemini CLI MCP test on this repository. So this one is going to edit the repository. So it's still going to ask us permission. Create branch. I'm going to allow it. I press enter to allow it. And we see that the branch was created successfully. If we go to GitHub now and we check out the branches, we may need to reload this. Now we see Gemini CLI MCP test. Awesome. And it was based on main. So we have the new branch and it worked great. We did that with just a prompt after the initial setup. It's basically just asking for things in natural language, like using the prompts for the LLMs. It's really powerful, really. So that's what the MCP server provided by Zapier is helping you with. The Zapier MCP, you can connect to different apps. You can have GitHub, Google Calendar, Gmail, anything here that you'd like to connect to. And you would only need to connect to the Zapier MCP in your AI client. So that's the basic advantage of this MCP server. You connect to the Zapier MCP server and this will handle the tools and the apps for you. And now you know how to set up the Zapier MCP server in Visual Studio Code and Gemini CLI. You can customize this to connect with any application that you need to work with.

And previously we've seen some of the built-in tools that you can use in Zapier, but we only used schedule. We haven't really like talked about the purpose of the other built-in tools. I'm going to do that right now so you can know exactly what is available and you can continue exploring and experimenting with your account. So, I'm going to create a new Zap for this and I'm going to show you the different built-in tools that you have. I'm going to zoom to fit and then I'm going to click on trigger. It's important that you know that popular built-in tools here, this section will vary based on whether you're selecting the trigger or an action. You can see that they are different. Some of them can act as triggers and some of them it can act as actions. For the trigger, we have these: webhooks, schedule, email, RSS, code, email parser, and subzap. This really depends on how you want to set up your workflow. But remember that your free account is limited to two-step Zaps. Some of these built-in tools will require three or more steps. So you should keep that in mind to know which ones you can or can't use with your free plan. Here we used schedule. You also have other options to explore.

Now for the action built-in tools, you have some of the most commonly used ones. For example, filter, formatter, and paths. These are three of the most commonly used ones because filter is used to only continue the workflow if a condition is matched. So it will basically filter the workflow to only run if something is true. For example, if a specific text matches a specific string, something like that as a filter for the workflow. The formatter is helpful for reformatting dates and time and other values because sometimes you will receive data from an application in a specific format but you want to send it to the other application in a different format. That is what formatter is for. You also have paths. Paths are basically like conditionals, conditionals that can run a specific like paths in your workflow based on whether a condition is true or false. And you also have delay and webhooks. So these are built-in tools that you may like to explore. Here we also have other like subcategories for the applications when you're filtering them. I haven't really mentioned this, but this can be helpful to find the app that you need to connect by apps, by AI, flow controls, utilities, products. These are like the Zapier products that you can use and also custom custom actions and webhooks. So, basically, this is how you can find the apps in the Zap editor and the built-in tools. But remember that with your free account, you can only use two-step Zaps and some of these will require three. So you will need to experiment with these if you'd like to try them.

When we started the course, we checked out Zap history, right? But at that time it was empty because we had a new account and we didn't have any Zaps. Now that we are close to completing the course, we do have some Zap history and I wanted to show you this so you know how to track your Zap history. I think this is very important and how to track your task usage to stay within the limits of your plan. So if we click on Zap history, we see Zap runs and task usage. Zap runs is what you see over here. First of all, you can immediately see the different runs of the Zaps that you've created. You can search Zap runs here on the search bar. You can have a date range. If you click here, you can have the date that you selected as a range, for example, here. Or you can choose past 30 days, current usage period, this month, last month. I'm going to keep the default, which is the past 30 days. If you want to remove any of these filters, just click on the X. And by default, it will be filtered by the past 30 days. You can filter by Zaps, and that's why it's very important to assign descriptive names to your Zaps because you can also filter by them to analyze their task usage. You can filter by apps to filter by Zaps that are somehow related to these applications or that use them in any specific steps. And you can also filter by folders, which is very important. So it's very important to group them in a logical way. And you can also refresh this. You can also clear all filters over here.

Then you can select these Zap runs individually and replay them, delete them, or download them. If you want to select all of them, you can click here to select all that are shown, like all the ones that are visible here, or deselect all, or select all. At most, you can select 5,000 at a time. And here you can filter by the status of that Zap run. For example, error, handled error, on hold, safely halted, filtered, successful, delayed, scheduled, and running. The different statuses that you can find in the Zap runs. Awesome. If you want to check out the individual details of a Zap run, you can click here on this arrow to view run details. That will take you to the editor and there you can see more granular information about what happened in each one of these steps. For example, here in the create message step for this particular run, this day at this time, it sent one new create to Google Chat. So that message was sent successfully. You can see the status of the different steps and what happened there when the step ran. That's very helpful if you want to dive into the details.

Then if we go here to task usage, initially you might not see anything, but that is because the current usage period is different here. Notice this. It's different. So you will have to change the date range, maybe to the past 30 days if you want to see that and apply. And there you go. You will see the task history of those 30 days that ran tasks that were automated and you can check out how many ran in the specific day during those 30 days. Here you have the billing reset. And here you can also sort the Zaps by how many tasks they use during that period. That's very helpful too to understand what Zaps are consuming the most tasks. So if we click here once, we will be sorting that in decreasing order. That is, I think in my opinion, the most helpful one because you will see the ones that are consuming most tasks at the top. You can also sort in increasing order like this. I personally prefer the decreasing order. Awesome. You can also filter by Zaps specifically here if you want to check out the task usage. And here you can also customize your notification settings and refresh in case you had any other Zap runs while you were checking out these charts. Remember to set the past 30 days here or any other time frame.

When you go to task usage, if you want to see the data here where you see the Zaps, you can also click on open Zap menu and then you can edit it or view runs. If you click here on view runs, you will be taken to the Zap runs again, but this time it will be filtered for that specific Zap. So you will only see the runs that apply to that specific Zap and you can clear all filters here. So that's how you can check your Zap history. Now we can see it because we have some Zap history in our account. Congratulations, you finished the course and you should be very proud of yourself. Now you know how to be more productive by automating repetitive tasks with Zapier and how you can leverage artificial intelligence during the process. Now that you completed the course, it's time to start applying what you've learned. Remember the question that I asked you when we started the course: If you could automate anything about your workflow right now, what would that be? If you remember the answer to that question, or if you want to think of a new answer to that question, start analyzing your workflow and identify opportunities for automation. I highly suggest writing down the steps that you usually follow in your daily work and then start thinking about where you could automate things. What Zapier features could you use? How could you incorporate what you've learned during your daily workflow to save you time and make you more productive? Once you start applying all of this to your daily life, you will realize how powerful automation can be. You can also incorporate these AI tools to help you with your daily tasks. That is where you will truly explore the power of automation. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the course and found it helpful. Now go and start automating. I wish you all the best.