Beginner Guide to Make

This article provides a comprehensive Beginner Guide to Make, an underutilized platform formerly known as Integromat, that offers a practical and user-friendly approach to automating your regular tasks without needing any coding experience. You can look forward to leaning:

• The basics of Make as a powerful no-code and low-code automation platform.
• How to create automated workflows or scenarios in Make with triggers, actions, and searches.
• A step-by-step walkthrough for building your first scenario in Make.
• An overview of some advanced features that Make offers for transforming your data.
• The potential advantages of upgrading to a paid subscription in Make for frequent users.

By the end of this guide, you will have a clear understanding of how to make the most of automation using Make, gaining efficiencies in your day-to-day tasks and workflows.

A Beginner Guide to Make: Your First Step Towards Automation

Automation is quickly becoming a powerful ally for individuals and businesses, helping save time and reduce redundancy cluttering up our day-to-day tasks. One of the most exciting developments in this field is the emergence of no-code and low-code tools, enabling anyone to automate their workflows, prototype ideas, or create fully functional web apps. And when it comes to the world of no-code and low-code automation, one platform often overlooked despite its potential is Make. This underutilized gem was formerly known as Integromat.

Today’s Beginner Guide to Make aims to help you understand and utilize this powerful and affordable platform. With absolutely no coding experience required, you can start automating your work with Make today! So let’s get started.

Understanding Make

Make is a platform designed to facilitate no-code and low-code automation. Users familiar with its previous name, Integromat, would be pleased to know that despite the rebranding and changes behind the scenes, the platform’s user experience remains essentially the same. Get specified tasks automated by creating scenarios in Make. This involves linking two or more apps in a sequence of trigger-action scripting. For instance, when you add an event to your Google Calendar (trigger), you can set it such that a new row with the details of the event is automatically created in Google Sheets (action). You can also integrate Gmail, OpenAI, and Slack to automate the process of email tagging, summarization, and message forwarding within your team. All these are possible through Make’s intuitive drag-and-drop visual interface.

Scenarios in Make: Triggers, Actions, and Searches

At the heart of every automation in Make is a scenario. Each scenario has a structure that consists of a trigger module and any number of actions and searches following the trigger. Here’s what these terms mean:

• Trigger: This is the event that initiates your automation to run. It could be when you add a new contact in HubSpot, receive a new Gmail email, or add a new record to a view in Airtable. You can also set the automation to run at specific times, rather than waiting for any external event in a designated app.
• Action: Once the automation is triggered, an action needs to be performed. This could range from creating a new document from a template in Google Drive or Notion, adding or updating rows in a spreadsheet, or sending messages through email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, to just about anything else you can imagine.
• Search: A search module serves to find data instead of creating it. You could, for instance, look up a record in a spreadsheet app, like Google Sheets or Airtable, or find a contact in a customer relationship management app, like HubSpot or Pipedrive. After finding the record, an action can then send that data to another app.

Building Your First Scenario

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building your first scenario:

1. Sign up for Make and log in to your account.
2. Click on Scenarios on the left-hand panel.
3. Click on the plus sign next to the folders to create a new folder.
4. Select the folder and click on the Create a New Scenario button to start a new scenario within that folder. Make will now open the Scenario Builder.
5. Name your scenario. For example, “Send Alerts in Slack for New Calendar Events”.
6. Add your trigger by clicking on the plus button in the middle of the screen. Search for the app you want to use (e.g., Google Calendar), select your trigger event (e.g., Watch Events), and complete the configuration by creating a connection to authorize Make with your app and choosing which calendar to watch.
7. Test the trigger module to ensure it can find your data. Once tested, it is set to run every 15 minutes and watch the specified calendar for new events. Each new event triggers the automation to run.
8. Add an action. Search for the app you want to perform an action or search in (e.g., Slack), select an action (e.g., Create a Message), and authorize Make to automate Slack with your account using a connection. The next step involves configuring your action module. Identify where you want to create or update an item, input the name of the item, and provide the text used for the message.
9. Test the complete scenario and confirm that it works.
10. Set the interval you want your scenario to run at and activate the automation.

5. Advanced Features in Make

Make doesn’t only offer basic automation capabilities. It also presents users with a host of advanced tools to manipulate and transform their data. For instance, Make offers several functions for transforming your data. By using Make’s Date/Time functions, you can re-format a timestamp to make it more readable. Remember to save the scenario once you’ve edited it to ensure your changes are incorporated. Once everything is working as it should, switch the scenario to “on”.

6. Gaining More from Make

If you find Make helpful and are considering upgrading to a paid subscription, you can review Make’s pricing page for more details on its pricing tiers and unique feature sets. Starting with the free tier is great for trying Make out, but paid plans offer more operations and more data, which is advisable if you plan to use Make frequently for automation tasks.

In conclusion, Make offers a fantastic platform to ease into the world of automation, even for beginners. With pre-designed scenarios, triggers, and actions catering to a host of popular web apps, anyone can get up and running with automation in no time. As we’ve seen from today’s Beginner Guide to Make, with some simple steps and no coding knowledge necessary, it’s possible to start creating time-saving automations right away.