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Welcome to the Make Academy!
We are happy to see you here, ready to start your automation journey and further your skill set with Make.
This content will help you explore the basics of Make at an easy pace.
Each piece of content should take you between 5-10 minutes to complete.
In this introductory unit, we’ll examine the user interface in Make for building a scenario, and start to build our own automation.
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Before you begin your first task with Make, let’s cover the important bits of information.
What is Make?
Make is a digital automation platform that enables you to design, build, and automate anything - from tasks and workflows to apps and systems, all from one place.
It is designed to provide a visual layout and connect your workflow needs, so you can see your automation come to life before your eyes.
What is automation?
When we say “automation”, we refer to the use of software to complete tasks and processes, partially or fully replacing the manual work involved in them.
A practical example of automation would be: when you are boiling a kettle, the power is cut from the device when the water temperature reaches an optimal level.
What are you about to learn?
You are going to build a very basic automation (or what we call a scenario) for this first Learning Path.
Each unit will guide you through a different step and focus on a different topic of using Make.
Over each unit you will build on it by exploring more functions and options, so it’s important that you do these in order!
LANGUAGE ADDITION
Your first task for this unit is to explore the user interface of building a scenario.
To get started, log into your Make account.
Make currently offers two languages – Čeština (Czech) and English. If you would like to change this, log in to your Make account and select here to navigate to your organization page. You can then select your default language.
You will be greeted with the organization workspace, as shown here.
Click + Create scenario. This is available in the top right hand corner of the screen.
This can be also accessed in the Scenarios item on the menu.
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The menu is where you access our scenario editor / designer. There is a lot to see here, but let’s not worry about this now. We’ll get there later on! Within Make, click the + object to begin.
The Menu
The menu is where you will access all of your functions outside of your scenario within Make. There is a lot there - don’t worry about this for the minute, we’ll be going through all of this when you need to. At the moment, we will focus on the scenario builder.
Add an App
Clicking the + button will open the various apps that we can start to add to our scenario. Have a quick scroll through - there’s a lot to work with!
Note: You can search for your chosen application. Feel free to explore our available apps, but please don’t add any app yet to your scenario.
The Toolbar
Run Once / Scheduling
When you are building a scenario, you need to test it to ensure that it works as intended. This is where you would use the Run once button. This will ‘execute’ your scenario. Once you have built a scenario, you can then select when to schedule it at intervals, depending on your need. This is where you would use scheduling.
Controls
To the right of Run once / Scheduling are our controls. Hover over each control for a very brief overview:
- Save
- Notes
- Auto-align
- Previous version
- Explain flow
- Scenario inputs and outputs
- Settings
Inbuilt Tools
It’s not just apps that you can connect to each other; sometimes you need to add different functions. For example, you may add a Router to send data on to different paths, or retrieve variables. Tools come in 3 forms: Flow control, Tools, and Text parser.
Open all three of the tools now - you’ll notice there’s a lot to work through! A lot of these will be covered in the Make Intermediate / Advanced courses. We will be introducing a few of these during this Learning Path. You can also add apps to your scenario from here using the +.
Collapse/Expand Toolbar
If you want to minimize the toolbar, you can do so here, give it a try!
Share / More…
Share allows you to share your scenario with the world, great for showcasing your Make skills and showing others how you created your scenario, so they can copy this to their organization.
Note: Any personal information such as connections or credentials are never shared, but the values you enter into modules will be visible: you’ll learn more about these terms in the rest of Make Foundation!
For a private, full backup you can export / import blueprints of your scenario, or copy your blueprints to your clipboard. Think of a blueprint as a backup of your scenario that you can share securely with other Make users!
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And that’s it! A very brief introduction to the Make scenario UI.
By now you should have an understanding of:
- How to create a new scenario
- Where the scheduling, tools, and discover functions are
This concludes your first unit - great! Let’s build on this by moving on to the next unit: Renaming / saving scenarios.
Or click here to restart this unit.