The Automator Help book, available in the Automator application by choosing Help > Automator Help, provides much more information and has an excellent walk-through of creating Automator workflows. This is only a brief summary about Automator, which should give you enough information to get started. To remove an action from your workflow, click the Delete (x) icon in the action's title bar. You can also see an action's description by clicking the Description label at the bottom of the action.Īs you add actions, they will join up to form the workflow - you will see triangles leading from one action to the next. To see what each action does, select the action in the Action list, and read the action description in the lower-left corner of the window.

Most actions require additional information - they have buttons, fields, and pop-up menus that you should use to tailor the action to the needs of your task. To create an Automator workflow, you drag actions from the Action list to the big workflow area on the right side of the window. The Fetch actions are in the Internet category. To view the actions that belong to a certain category, click the category's icon in the Library list. There are two lists on the left side of the window - the Library list, showing categories of similar Automator actions, and the Action list, showing the actions that belong to the selected category. Then Automator will show a new, blank workflow window: For creating workflows that automate Fetch, you should select the default template ('Custom' or 'Workflow' depending on your version of Mac OS X), and click the Choose button. When you open Automator, it will ask you to select a template or starting point for a new workflow. You can then save these workflows and run them to perform the same task over and over again, without having to set it up each time. You do not have to be a programmer to use Automator - Automator lets you assemble actions into workflows in an easy-to-use graphical interface. Automator lets you put together individual steps, called actions, into a complete task, called a workflow.

Best mac automator workflows