Zapier feature guides

You might have seen webhooks mentioned in your apps' settings and wondered if they're something you should use. The answer, in a nutshell, is probably yes.

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What are webhooks?

App tips

If you work with data that needs to be split—like separating first and last names—here's how to split a cell in Excel and Google Sheets. 

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How to split text in Excel and Google Sheets

Macs come with screenshot tools to capture precisely what you want—your full screen, a specific window with or without its shadow, or just a small section of your screen. The only problem is, Macs hide their screenshot tools behind keyboard shortcuts.

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How to take a screenshot on a Mac

Automation inspiration

Learn how you can kick off Zapier's automated workflows with just a quick snap or scan from your mobile device.

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How to trigger automation from QR codes and NFC tags with Zapier

Do your apps play nicely together? With Zapier’s built-in Formatter tool, you can make text work for any of the apps you use, automatically. 

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The Zapier Formatter guide: How to automatically format text the way you want

Business tips

It's hard to imagine life today without the Contacts app on your phone. Phone numbers are hard enough to remember, let alone the email and mailing addresses for everyone you know.

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The beginner's guide to CRM: Customer relationship management

App tutorials

Putting together a set format and reusing it every time can speed up your note-taking process. Here's how to take notes faster in Evernote with templates.

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How to use templates to quickly make new notes in Evernote

Want to make sure you're only sharing files with the people you want? Here's how to see who you're sharing with in Dropbox.

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How to see who has access to a Dropbox folder

It came as a flash while reading on a lazy Saturday morning, as all good ideas do. I wonder if you could make a fill-in-the-blank question in an online form? Sounds easy enough. Turns out, not quite so much.

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How to make fill-in-the-blank questions in an online form

In the beginning, websites were all landing pages, simple one-page sites that provided links to other pages on the same server or on the internet.

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The landing page guide: How to promote your product on one web page

eBay emailed—someone ordered something from your store. Your bank emailed with your monthly statement, your credit card is reminding you to pay your bill, and Apple's reminding you of that app you bought last night.

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The email parser guide: How to automatically copy data from your emails

Data reports

Work changes. The skills that got you here may not get you to the next level of your career, and the next role you take may have not even existed a decade ago.

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Zapier Apps at Work: The Fastest Growing Apps in 2019

Remote work tips

Twice a year, the Zapier team gets together at a company retreat. The rest of the year, we manage to work together across 17 time zones, using Slack, Zoom, and some sheer effort to all stay connected.

The pros and cons of working across time zones: What to expect when you work in a distributed company

Engineering insights

Bundles are back. For years, web apps prompted a great unbundling of software, with a focus on apps that did one thing well. That changed in 2018.

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The 30 Fastest Growing Business Apps in 2018

Shipping—as much as any software—is what makes eCommerce works. You can sell products from your hometown to customers around the world thanks to the postal service. Yet it’s hardly an enjoyable experience. Shipping costs are formidable.

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How to Compare Shipping Rates: 6 Apps to Find The Best Shipping Service

Something makes an Apple store feel different from a Samsung store, Starbucks from a local coffee shop, Uniqlo from Gap. Walk into a McDonald's in any country, and while some things may look unfamiliar, in general, it still feels like a McDonald's.

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How to Customize Your Shopify Store Emails, Theme, Domain, and More

Screenshots are the simplest way to show off your new program, point out a bug, and save that picture on Facebook to your camera roll. They're the easiest way to save anything on your screen.

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Screenshot Tools, Tips, and Shortcuts: How to Capture Anything on Your Screen

It’s hard to stop a rocket, impossible to ignore an idea whose time had come. For a species as talkative as homo sapiens, a chat app was always bound to be the killer app for smart devices.

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When Slack Won the Team Chat Market

Documents get printed, websites get published, spreadsheets get filed away for accountants to double-check later. Presentations, though, get presented.

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How to Share Presentations: 5 Apps and Tricks to Publish Slides Online

It’s a rare day when you can write a document in one sitting using only one app. Far more often, we switch back and forth between document and apps, pulling research, data, and quotes together before working it into one piece.

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Data-Powered Documents: How to Combine Facts and Figures in Modern Writing Apps

Apps help us get work done every day, but we still need an operating system to run them. Hidden in the background much of the time, they're what power our keyboard shortcuts, run our favorite tools, and keep us productive.

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The 5 Best New iOS and macOS Work Features in 2018

Your smartphone’s the perfect place to start work. Its small screen and smaller keyboard might not exactly be the best for typing out an extensive report or outlining every step in a new project.

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The Zapier Guide to Automating Your Phone With Drafts

Something funny happened as our phones turned into pocket computers: The phone part quit being as important. Our phones aren’t glued to our ears anymore.

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The Best Way to Record Calls and Transcribe Them Quickly

Far too often, it goes like this: You download data from your apps—your PayPal transaction data, say, or an exported email list from your old newsletter app—and open it in a spreadsheet. 

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How to Automate Google Sheets With Macros—No Coding Required

In a world where Apple sells nearly seven iPhones each second, it’s hard to imagine the two Steves (Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) needing leads.

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The Marketing Funnel Guide: How to Qualify Leads and Turn Them Into Customers

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How to Share Your Internet Connection

"How did you ever do without it?" asked the original ad for VisiCalc, itself the original spreadsheet app. Yet in 1979, that answer was more than self explanatory.

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The Software Categories Guide: What Work Apps Do

Your company just updated its name—it's not Apple Computer, Inc. anymore, now it's just Apple, Inc, and every reference you have to OS X needs to be replaced to macOS.

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How to Find and Replace Any Text in Your Documents

You've got an email or letter with phone numbers, email addresses, or website links throughout the text—and you'd like to get a list of each of those items on their own.

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How to Extract Email Addresses, Phone Numbers, and Links From Text

You know you should back up your files. But it's a chore that's easy to ignore until you accidentally delete that Facebook album—right after deleting those same pictures from your phone. Accidents happen.

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How to Back Up Everything From All Your Apps and Devices

Writing only requires words, a bit of punctuation, and perhaps some paragraph breaks to organize thoughts. Headings, italicized text, images, fancy quotes, footnotes, bullet points and more are just decoration.

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Write Faster: Your Manual to Markdown, the Web's Simplest Plain-Text Syntax

And... cut. Movies feel continuous, like a snapshot of real life. But really they're the combination of hundreds of cuts and snippets edited together with the best possible take of each scene.

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Stay Private: How to Hide Your Webcam, Mute Your Mic, and Turn Off Notifications

Best apps

Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and notes—they're the files that make work work, that showcase your new project and last quarter's performance and your ideas for the future.

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The 6 Best Office Suites for Your Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations

Your inbox can be overwhelming when it's packed with unread messages. But it doesn't have to be that way. If you check your email often enough and bring it back to Inbox Zero, all you'll need to do is answer a handful of unread emails.

How do you Graph Your Unread Email Count in Gmail?

App comparisons

You don't really need a new app to write. You could write a book in your email drafts, Notepad, your phone's notes app, or even in SMS messages if you're desperate. All you need is a blank space to type your thoughts.

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Scrivener vs Ulysses: The Best App for Longform Writing

G Suite ties all of Google's apps together into the original online office suite. Odds are, you already use some of Google's apps every day. Perhaps your personal email is on Gmail, or your photos might be backed up to Google Drive. 

An Intro to G Suite

You can have your team share the same calendar events, email signatures, and team files without needing to re-share each item with every new team member.

Add Company Email Signatures, Document Templates, Event Calendars, and More to G Suite

The most important thing about your apps is the data in them. So when you get a new G Suite account, don't leave that behind. Instead, you should back up your data from your old account, then import it into your new G Suite account. Here's how.

Import Your Team's Data Into G Suite

Publishing the next great American novel requires more than just a text editor. You need somewhere to craft your prose, sure, but also need tools to organize your text into coherent chapters and compile them into a polished book.

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The Zapier Guide to Ulysses

Publishing online is so easy, you can jot your thoughts down and share them with the world in minutes.

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Build a Writing and Editing Workflow with Google Docs and WordPress

The newly redesigned Google Sites is a great place to start a website for free. In minutes, you can add text and images, embed documents and maps, and share it with a customized link—though not on your own domain name yet.

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How to Make a Multiple-Column Website with Google Sites' Hidden Menu

Most of us carefully protect our most important objects. We lock our homes with a deadbolt, perhaps invest in a security system or store valuables in a safe with its own lock and key, and make sure our cars are locked with the alarm turned on.

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Two-Factor Authentication: A Security System for Your Digital Life

It's hard to write without the web. Regardless of your topic and how many books you might cite, you'll probably still need to do research online and quote numerous sites to strengthen your final piece.

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How to Gather Research and Create a Bibliography in Google Docs

Slack is designed to replace your inbox and be the one place where all your communications would happen, keeping you and your team productive and informed all at the same time. But, like all communication tools, it can also be a distraction.

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12 Ways to Stay Productive in Slack

Productivity tips

It's not every day that you'll find a good new book to read and discover that it's free. The internet's filled with more text than anyone could possibly read in their lifetimes.

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The Best Free Books from O'Reilly Press

Starting a new business already costs enough. By the time you've registered your business, bought the perfect domain name, and built up your inventory, you might not have much left in the budget for your eCommerce software.

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Start Your First Store: The 6 Best Free eCommerce Apps

If only your office were quieter, if your colleagues would quit asking questions, if the phone would stop ringing. If only your desk were neater, your notebooks cleaner, your files a bit more organized.

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Deep Work vs. Messy: How to Balance Productivity and Creativity

You've gathered data, perhaps stats about your latest marketing campaign or your sales data from last year. You need to figure out the trends, whip up some charts, and turn them into a report or presentation.

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How to Automatically Generate Charts and Reports in Google Sheets and Docs

Your store will need the best-in-class tools—and the essentials are right here. From the best places to find themes and add-ons to your store, to the best tools and automations to run your store, here are the resources you need to keep your store growing.

How to Run a Successful Online Store

Computers help us be more productive. But they're also perhaps the most distracting devices ever invented. The first personal computers were little more than a blank screen with a terminal where you'd type in text commands.

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5 Steps to Tweak Your Software for More Productive Work

Few things grab the Zapier team's attention like popular new apps—and we're not alone. Whenever the next Pokémon Go or Snapchat comes out, you can't help but hear about it, even if you don't read tech news.

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20 Web Apps That Ruled the Workplace in 2016

Forms are among the web's most versatile tools. Need a contact form? Drag an Email and Text field into a form editor, copy its embed code, add it to your site, and you're done.

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How to Accept Payments From an Online Form

If numbers are involved, a spreadsheet's the tool for the job. But spreadsheets can also be used for so much more: storing contacts, compiling research, organizing outlines, and more.

Write Faster with Spreadsheets: 10 Shortcuts for Composing Outlines, Research, HTML Tables and More

Let's look at project management app stacks from more than a dozen teams across a range of industries, to see how they turn projects into reality.

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Project Management Software Stacks: The Apps That 13 Companies Use to Manage Projects

Customer stories

Creating something new takes time. A lot of time. The idea might come in a flash, but turning it into a product with customers and revenue takes far, far longer. Unless you have the right process in place.

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Build a Prototype Without Code: Rely on Apps, Integrations and APIs

How we work at Zapier

It's not enough to write compelling content. Author the shortest and sweetest post—or the longest longform—and it's still only one post. A one-time shot.

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From Blog to Book: The Complete Guide to Writing, Editing and Publishing Your First eBook

The most important things in your email marketing are consistency and authenticity, along with feedback from your readers and experimentation. In closing, here's some quick pointers on how to achieve all of them in your email marketing.

Don't Quit: How to Keep Sending Great Emails

Your potential customers are only potential customers for a fleeting period of time. They'll visit your site, perhaps try out your app, check out your menu or look through the services you offer. 

Go All-In-One: 10 CRMs with Awesome Marketing Automation Features

Here are some of the best reasons why you should aa CRM, and some great ideas for how they can help your team get more done in less time.

How to Pick the Best CRM, Put it to Work and Automate Your Data Entry

The phone app is one of the least smart parts of your phone. It’s still tied to one phone network, with a number from your local area, and likely costs per minute you talk, depending on where you’re calling and where you live.

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How to Build a Smarter International Phone with Twilio in Just 15 Minutes

You should never overpack. I should know after flying over 22,000 miles this past month, lugging around a briefcase and repacking it a half-dozen times for security. That's when you begin to question what’s absolutely essential for business travel.

Matthew Guay

Matthew's articles

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Intro to automation

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How Zapier works

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