# n8n Beginner Course (1/9) - Introduction to Automation

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** n8n
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVTkqbn_tY
- **Дата:** 19.06.2024
- **Длительность:** 12:47
- **Просмотры:** 718,360

## Описание

⌨ Sign up to n8n Cloud for a free trial: https://app.n8n.cloud/register

Or:

npm install -g n8n
n8n start

*Resources:*

❔ Need help or want to discuss the course? Join the conversation on our forum: https://community.n8n.io/t/beginner-course-1-9-introduction-to-automation/48589

🛠 Workflow templates: https://n8n.io/workflows/

📚 Documentation: https://docs.n8n.io/

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVTkqbn_tY) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

hello and welcome to the first video of the beginner course for Anan in this course we will be covering all of the basics that you need to know to get started with anidan in this video we'll be covering an introduction to automation my name is Maxim and I'm a marketing and data content creator as well as instructor for l a French training company I've been working with inen for over four years now built over 100 workflows and trained 500 students at improving their marketing and data automation today we're going to be talking about an introduction to automation why do we need automation what is it what are the Core Concepts what is a workflow as well as some best practices to help you get started first of all why do we need automation the whole reason we need automation is to make datadriven decisions when we take decisions based on feeling or intuition it is subject to interpretation it is subjective this makes it difficult to estimate and justify the return on investment and often incurs wasted resources whether they be budgetary or time related however when we take a data driven approach this makes it much more logic driven and objective it'll improve your Capac capacity to report and increase your visibility on Roi as well as requiring fewer resources human resources budgetary and in terms of time automation is the key to being data driven when tasks are executed manually we have a lot of wasted time we have human error from repeated low value tasks as well as High human resource requirements this leads to low employee happiness and retention no one is happy to be doing low value tasks for example copying data from one spreadsheet to another however when we start to integrate automation we gain much more predictability and data availability increased employee efficiency because each employee can now Focus their efforts on much higher value tasks this leads to higher Roi and lower needs for human resources so what is automation let's start with the definition automation is a predictable set of predetermined actions that transfers data from one point to another so this is a very wordy definition instead of breaking it down like this I would like to show you an example here we can see an example of a workflow so we have a form submission when the form is submitted we check what kind of company is submitting the form if we cannot find a company we ignore if it's a low value company we can add the person submitting the form to an email sequence if it's a high value company we can add the information to a Google sheet and if it's an ideal customer then we can give this information to an account manager ASAP so as you can see here we have a predictable set of predetermined actions depending on which kind of company is submitting the form we have a very predictable set of actions that need to be executed and we have a data transfer from one point to another the starting point being the form submission and depending on what kind of company is submitting the form we're going to be transferring the data to either an email tool a Google Sheets or for example slack to notify the account manager as you can imagine if we do not have a predictable set of predetermined actions and depending on the kind of company we weren't able to say if it's this kind of company we do this if it's that that then we wouldn't be able to create an automation because we would have to have some kind of human intervention again if we do not have any data transfer then we're not really automating anything um so the data transfer explains itself I'd like to cover some Core Concepts of automation that are important to understand before building your first workflows the first thing I'd like to talk about is a trigger is what starts an automation so from the example that we looked at earlier we can see that the trigger was the form of

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVTkqbn_tY&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

submission when we're going to be drawing out these automations we're going to see that the trigger is not going to have an entry Arrow only an exit Arrow there are many different kinds of triggers a trigger can be manual so executed manually it can be scheduled so every minute every day at 8: a. m. once a month at 400 p. m. or it can be linked to applications that we can trigger workflow when we receive a Webb hook when a property is updated in the CRM or when for example a form is submitted under the form submission um block you can see an example of an n node um here the nen form trigger this allows you to trigger a workflow when a form is submitted using the native Inn form trigger then we have filtering is what allows us to allow or block certain types of data from following specific paths based on certain conditions so using the example from earlier here we can see depending on the kind of company whether there is no company a low value company a high value company or if the company is an ideal customer we're going to be sending that company down different paths underneath you can see the fil node in naden the filter node allows you to as its name indicates filter data based on predetermined conditions so here for example we could say if we had no company then we wouldn't continue the workflow because there is nothing to do if we have no company another important thing to understand is actions or apps actions allow you to interact with applications on the web this is what you're going to be using most of the time when building automation we can take a couple of examples so with Google Sheets you might want to update rows create a sheet or get a spreadsheet um if you're using Dropbox you can upload a file get a file create a folder move a file from one folder to another if we're using slack you can send a message get a user get all of the messages from a specific Channel if we're using Salesforce which is a CRM we can get a company get a contact create a lead associate a lead to a company this is going to depend highly on which kinds of apps you're using every app is going to have a different set of actions that you can use for it so what is a workflow we looked at the example earlier with the form submission then the different paths depending on the kind of company and then different actions most workflows are going to follow a similar template they're going to start with a trigger so the trigger is what starts or launches the workflow it could be every day at 8:00 a. m. or when this happens or when launched manually then we're going to be either sorting filtering formatting transforming or segmenting the data um so this could be if this then that only or change this to that this is when we're going to be able to look at all of the filters that we created earlier or make modifications to the data to then send to the actions which are going to be usually the last parts of your workflow either updating for example a Google sheet sending an email or notifying a person let's say through a slack message i' like to quickly cover some automation best practices before starting any automation you need to make sure that you are mapping it out so when someone is going to come to you and ask I would like to automate this task or if you have an idea I would like to automate this task the first step that you're going to want to do is map it out correctly mapping out a process before building it is going to ensure that you have visibility on one do you have an understanding of the task of the predictable set of actions that the task represents two it's going to give you more visibility on the different tools apps or actions that are going to be used three is going to give you more visibility on the feasibility um nothing is worse than spending half an hour or two hours building an automation to then realize at the end that it

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BVTkqbn_tY&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 12:00)

actually isn't possible mapping out the workflow is also going to help you estimate the workload how long is it going to take me to automate this task and finally sometimes mapping out the workflow is going to show you where you might need some human intervention if the task you want to automate cannot be mapped out into a predetermined set of actions then you might need some human intervention in that workflow um in the advanced course we'll cover how you can use AI to sometimes relieve the need for human intervention so how do you map an automation the first thing you want to do is create a flowchart and there are many different ways you can create this flowchart you can use Meo fig Jam or any other tool and when you want to do is you want to list every different part of the process as an individual block then working left to right you're going to want to link these different blocks with arrows depending on how they interact so if we take the example from earlier we start the workflow with a form submission so we're going to create a first block call it form submission then the next step in the automation is we need to filter depending on which kind of company so here we create a block what kind of company and from that block we create all of these different arrows depending on what kind of company and what the different options are then we're going to link these this question to the final actions so adding an email to a sequence or adding the data to a Google sheet or sending the information to an account manager these Maps can be a lot more complicated than the given example and especially for those much more complicated examples it is very much worth taking the time to map it out if while mapping it out you realize that something is unclear then this is something that you need to make sure that you understand before starting building the workflow because again it would be a shame to get to the end and realize that it actually isn't feasible this was the first video for the naden beginner course in the next video we will be covering web Hooks and apis two very important Notions that you need to understand before building your first nen workflows thank you and see you in the next video

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15664*