Introduction to the task automation for everyone
Automate daily routines and boost your productivity like a PRO!
Everyone knows that situation. You get up in the morning, sooner or later a screen comes before your eyes. Whether it’s a laptop or other device, we need to perform, usually, our necessary activities with these.
Whether you want to or not, you will get there. To the point, where repeated activity sees the light of the day.
It can be answering the same questions from potential customers, sending emails via Gmail for new SurveyMonkey responses, adding leads to the spreadsheet in Google Sheets, creating Calendar events from Trello Cards, or posting to multiple Twitter accounts.
If you do not find yourself in any of the above, I am adding another 300 tips for inspiration.
It is through automation, that we try to robotize, shorten, or at best minimize the duration of these repetitive activities. (alternatively reduce the error rate of human factor failure and other audible phrases justifying the need for automation, which I already know by heart from the theoretical part of the bachelor’s thesis :P)
While automation is becoming more and more concerned with IT, but also with non-IT persons, there are many, who do not deal with automation. They think it is unattainable with their insufficient skills on this topic.
With my article, I will try to prove, that automation has become available, as the title suggests, really, for everyone.
Zapier, or the automation bestseller for me
Zapier is a service that lets non-technical folks configure sophisticated integrations between the apps they use, and automate the workflows they do every day. A Zapier App is a way for you to make your API available to the Zapier platform, accessible by millions of users, and able to connect with hundreds of other applications, instantly.
There is a large amount of material to be found on their website, which will rocket your first attempts to set up automated processes. The use of the service is free as long as you do not exceed 100 tasks per month. Other platforms worth seeing are available, such as Workato, Mulesoft, or Ifttt.
PDF Generator API also made integration with Zapier!
It hasn’t been long since the integration between the PDF Generator API and Zapier platform was successfully completed. We are very pleased that through this step, we can contribute to an even simpler initial setup, and at the same time deepen the possibilities of automating customer processes.
If you have not heard about the PDF Generator API, I would like to introduce the main idea in a short way. PDF Generator API allows you easily generate transactional PDF documents and reduce the development and support costs by enabling your users to create and manage their document templates using a browser-based drag-and-drop document editor.
Enough of the theorizing, the integration of the two mentioned platforms in practice can represent the following use-case. We can imagine an employee, who works with data in a Google spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is set as an input to the automated process from Zapier, via the API, to the output - PDF Generator. Adding a row to the table of the successful course graduates will trigger the sending of data via the API. The output data are generated into a template certificate, which is sent to the successful graduate via email. We started by adding a line, we end by receiving an email with the generated certificate, great isn’t it?
I have listed some interesting facts which emphasize the importance of the described issue, inspired by TheBasisPoint and EskerBlog.
Last days, I came across a very interesting quote that is worth sharing, especially in this topic.
So don’t wait and throw yourself into it! Fingers crossed :)
