How to build a more powerful automation with Airtable and Zapier

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Hello there!! 👋

In this lesson you’ll develop your automation skills further by creating an automation between Airtable and Zapier.

Focus mode ACTIVATED. 💻

Shot of Inspiration ☕

AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI.

-Karim Lakhani, HBR

Context Building 🏔

🧱 Project: Build a More Powerful Automation

⏲️ Estimated time: 30 minutes

🛠️ Tools: Airtable, Zapier

Today, you'll set up an automation that assigns a priority tag to form submissions within a community waitlist.

An automation is a process that allows you to perform repetitive tasks or actions automatically. It involves setting up a workflow that triggers specific actions based on predefined conditions or events. Let's consider the calendar app on your phone. When you want a reminder about a trip to the cinema or an upcoming party, you might add it to your phone's calendar. Then, 30 minutes before the event, you receive a notification reminding you that the event is coming up soon. Your calendar app follows the predefined rule of "When an event is scheduled, send me a reminder 30 minutes before." That's exactly how automation works.

Imagine you're planning to launch a new community or product. You want to gather as many of the right people as possible for the launch, so you set up a waitlist and start collecting applications to be the first to be invited. After a while, you might end up with hundreds of entries, but manually sifting through them to find the right applications to accept can be time-consuming. With automation, you can save time by setting up a filter that sorts these applications for you, allowing you to filter out the suitable entries and group them together.

🔥 In this lesson you’ll learn:

The basics of Zapier and Airtable

How to build a Zap, using Triggers, Filters and Actions

How to automatically assign tags in Airtable based on a form entry

Let's Prep 🥗

Note: The images in the screenshots for the step-by-step guides for this lesson may not be exactly what you see in Zapier as the design of Zapier has been slightly tweaked since the guides were created. The steps, however, remain exactly the same.

Get ready to build!

To make your life easier when you build, it’s good to get some practical stuff out the way first. Follow these steps so you’re ready to build:

Create an account on Zapier here. To publish the ‘Zap’ you build in today’s lesson (which means to use it beyond just the lesson example and experiment with it beyond the lesson) you will need to sign up for a 7-day free trial of the ‘Professional’ plan (card required). However, if you’re happy with just following the process to see how this automation works, you can test the automation once in today’s lesson without signing up for a free-trial.

Create a free account on Airtable.

Click on this link to make a copy of the Airtable database and dummy data that you’ll use for this lesson. Once the page opens, click on "Copy Base" and add the base to your Workspace.

Time to cook 👩‍🍳

Understanding The Database

Now, let's take a quick look at the database you've already copied over to Airtable. This will allow you to get a sense of the form and table structure.

Follow this step by step guide.

Adding Test Data To Airtable

In this step, you'll add a test entry using your Airtable form. This is just to verify that everything functions as intended.

Follow this step by step guide.

Setting Up Your Trigger

Now, let's dive into the exciting part! In this step, you'll begin setting up your automation using Zapier. First, you'll learn how to authorise your account with Airtable, set up your trigger, and familiarise yourself with the Zapier interface.

Follow this step by step guide.

Setting Up Your Actions

Lastly, you'll learn how to set up action steps, map data to fields, create filters, and utilise the data from previous steps. By the end, you'll have a fully functional automation that you can test.

Follow this step by step guide.

That’s a wrap, we hope you found this lesson helpful!