The XRay.Tech Blog

Automating your workflows doesn’t always require using robust automation platforms like Zapier or Unito. Sometimes, a simple plugin or two is enough to help you save time and work a little more efficiently.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at two plugins for Figma that will help you to create design assets faster and in fewer steps. Both are totally free, and they only take seconds to download and install.

With these plugins, you’ll be able to dynamically populate Figma text layers with content from a Google Sheet, and instantly export your frames into Google Slides presentations. 

Google Sheets Sync

First, let’s dive into Google Sheets Sync, a plugin by David Williames. To get started, you can download and install the plugin here.

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Once you have the plugin, create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets with a table of the content that you want to use. Make sure to put your titles into the first row of your spreadsheet. The Google Sheets Sync documentation contains additional information for setting up your sheet.

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When your sheet is all filled out, click on “Share” to create a shareable link and copy it to your clipboard.

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In Figma, rename each text layer that you want to replace with one of the column titles from your sheet. Just remove any spaces, and add a “#” at the beginning of the title. The capitalization of your layer titles doesn’t need to match the capitalization of your Sheets titles. We’ll use camel case in our example, but you can use all lowercase, all caps, or whatever you’d like.

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For instance, if your column title in Sheets is “Company Name”, then your Figma layer title should be something like “#companyName”. 

Right click on some blank space in Figma to bring up a small menu. Hover over “plugins” and select “Google Sheets Sync” from the list. 

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You’ll be prompted to enter the Google Sheets link that you copied earlier. Paste it in now, and click on “Fetch and sync.”

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You should see the text in your designated layers replaced with content from your Sheets table. This can be a much faster way to fill in large amounts of placeholder text or real data in your designs. 

Sync to Slides

Now let’s jump into another helpful Figma plugin, Sync to Slides. 

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Figma is a powerful digital design tool, but while it’s a great option for building a slide deck, it’s not the best tool for presenting one. You could use the prototype feature to mimic a slide presentation, but it’s much more cumbersome to edit the order of slides than a simple app like Google Slides.

On the other hand, exporting all of your frames one by one and loading them into Slides can also be a frustrating waste of time, especially when you’re regularly making updates to your presentations.

Sync to Slides by Siddhartha Gudipati lets you export your Figma frames to a Slides deck with just a few clicks, making it easy to do your design work in Figma and conduct your presentations with Slides. 

You can download and install the plugin for free here.

To start using the plugin, just create a blank Slides presentation and give it an appropriate name. If there’s a blank slide as part of the default template, delete it - you want a completely blank file to work with. 

Click on “Share” to get a sharing link. It will need to be set to “everyone with the link can edit”. 

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Copy the link, and open up Figma. Right click on a blank part of the canvas to bring up a menu. Hover over plugins, and select “Sync to Slides from the list”.

Paste in your Slides link, and select the frames from that page that you want to export. You can also check “All frames” for convenience if you’d like to export everything on the page. 

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Click the Sync button, and wait a moment for the process to finish. Check your Slides file, and you should see all of your frames exported as images. 

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Saving time with simple plugins

You don’t always need a complex automation just to save a little time. Simple workflow hacks like installing a useful plugin can also eliminate some robotic work from your daily routine and help you to claim back some time. 

These free Figma plugins won’t be saving you hours each week, but they might give you enough time to take an extra coffee break - and sometimes, that’s all you need. 

If you’d like to see more tips for streamlining your workflows, be sure to check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Interest in no-code and low-code automation is rapidly increasing, and if you’re curious about getting started in the space, it’s important to know the best tools to get started with. 

In this post, we’ll show you four of the most useful pieces of software in the no-code and low-code automation discipline. This isn’t an exhaustive list of every no-code/low-code tool out there, but it’s a good place to begin if you’re new to the concepts and looking to explore automation. 

1. Zapier: Simple No-Code Automation 

For a relatively new industry like no-code automation, Zapier is practically a venerable old institution. They’ve been around since the beginning, and their automation platform supports an extensive range of software. 

Zapier’s intuitive UI lets you easily build sequential automations, connecting as many actions as you’d like to a specified trigger. For instance, you could set up an automation that triggers whenever you create a new file in your “Sales Reports” folder in Google Drive, and have that automation send a slack message to your #sales channel, and an email to your Sales Manager. 

As a no-code tool that lets users build automations completely with a GUI, Zapier is ideal for automation beginners and users with moderate technical abilities. The biggest downside to Zapier is that, while it has integrations for thousands of different tools, its integrations for each app aren’t as deep as other platforms like Integromat. However, Zapier is still the best tool to start with as a beginner.

Try out Zapier at zapier.com.

2. Integromat - Advanced low-code automation

Integromat is a somewhat similar tool to Zapier, but is better described as low-code automation software. Integromat lets you construct automated “scenarios” with branching paths and complex actions. More advanced users can make custom API calls and write code to craft their own integrations, building exactly the automation that they want.

For instance, we built an automation in Integromat for one of our clients that created and published web pages complete with custom Stripe products. 

Integromat has far fewer supported apps than Zapier, but lets you do more with the apps that it does support. While Zapier is great for beginners and anyone with at least a moderate level of technical skill, Integromat is more suited to advanced users - people with some coding experience and considerable technical knowledge. 

If you’re looking to connect your apps with a low-code approach, check out Integromat.

3. Airtable - Ideal automation database

Airtable isn’t strictly a no-code/low-code automation tool itself, but it is a great app to use in conjunction with platforms like Zapier and Integromat. Airtable is a powerful spreadsheet app with a lot of features and options that make it perfect for use as a database powering your no-code/low-code automations.

At XRay.Tech, we control many of our automations with Airtable forms and views. Forms let you fill out a survey to add a new record to a database, while views let you sort and filter your databases to precise specifications. Since you can trigger Zapier and Integromat automations whenever a new record appears in an Airtable view, this gives you the ability to easily trigger and control your automations. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Airtable works, you can check out our blogs on Airtable views and see how we set up an automated social media calendar using Airtable and Zapier. 

You can also gather data on your automations as they run and compile it in Airtable, using linked records to create efficient databases documenting the entirety of your automated infrastructure. 

Try Airtable at airtable.com

4. Keyboard Maestro - Powerful Keyboard & Mouse Automations

Of the tools on this short list, Keyboard Maestro is perhaps the least well-known, but it offers remarkable value for technical users looking to build automations. Keyboard Maestro is a Mac-only desktop app that lets you trigger automations based on inputs from your keyboard and mouse. 

With Keyboard Maestro automations, you can open up all your frequently used apps with a single keyboard shortcut, automatically fill out forms on the web, run scripts to scrape data or generate reports, and more. You can use the app to automate nearly any action that you perform on your computer - so long as you’re willing to spend the time to build the automations. 

Like Integromat, Keyboard Maestro is best suited to more technical users. While the app does come with lots of prebuilt automations to get you started, you’ll get the most out of it if you’re able to write some code and build automations that are uniquely crafted to fit your own workflows. 

Keyboard Maestro offers a lifetime licence for a flat price of $36, making it a great value in comparison to the other SaaS apps listed here. It also has a free trial, so you can mess around with it and figure out if it’s right for you before you buy. 

Download Keyboard Maestro at keyboardmaestro.com 

Automation Tools for Every Skill Level

The automation space is quickly growing, and there are tools for everyone to use no matter their technical skill level. Whether you’re a novice just connecting a couple apps in Zapier or a technical wizard building complex data-scraping automations in Keyboard Maestro, the important thing is to find an app that works for you and to start automating the robotic work that eats up your time. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can break into automation, and how XRay can help you to automate your workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

No-code and low-code automation is often focused on the needs of individual users or smaller teams, but there are many tools in the space that are well-suited to enterprise organizations or any company looking to scale up.

In this post, we’re going to take a quick look at three pieces of software that are ideal for businesses that want to build automations around large complex datasets, create intricate custom workflows, or to sync directly with popular software you’re likely already using. 

If you’d like to learn more about these tools, or if there are any that you think we should cover in the future, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Sync your databases with Unito

The first app on our list is Unito.

Unito is highly specialized automation software that is entirely dedicated to syncing data between different sources. Each “flow” in Unito lets you identify two apps that you want to sync up and allows you to define exactly how the data should move between the two sources. 

With Unito, you can have two databases set to maintain perfect parity, with an update to either one being automatically applied to the other. Alternatively, you can set the sync to only work in one direction, so (for example) updates made to your Google Sheets database will be copied to a Notion table, but not the other way around.

Unito is a great tool for any organization with departments who are all using different software to interact with the same data. Your engineers can keep working in Github, your project managers can keep working in Asana, and your analysts can keep working in Google Sheets; with the right Unito flows, they’ll all have access to the right data without any redundancies or extra work.

Unito doesn’t put any limit on the amount of records you can sync, so you can use it for even your largest and most detailed databases. However, you are limited to a certain number of total flows based on the pricing plan you choose.

The “Personal” plan is only $10/mo and is a great way to try the app out for a while and see if it suits your needs, but does only include up to 10 flows. Higher pricing tiers will let you create and run as many as 80 flows and offer additional features which you learn more about on their pricing page.

To get Unito, visit unito.io 

Control automations and connect to apps like Salesforce with Airtable

Airtable is a database app which is somewhat similar to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. However, despite the similarities in basic function, Airtable has a robust feature set that sets it apart from other database and spreadsheet software.

Filters, views, and column types give you extensive control over how you display your data, even allowing for several specialized views of the same information. For instance, let’s imagine that you’ve made a table with your company directory. Each record contains an employee’s name, their title, department, start date, and official company picture. 

You could then create a view that only includes employees in the marketing department, or a view that only contains employees who joined the company after a certain date. You could even use a gallery view to put the profile pictures front and center to make it easier to browse the table visually. All of these views can be saved permanently for easy access, and won’t alter the actual data itself; they’ll only give you different ways to sort the data. 

These view and filter features aren’t just about creating convenient ways to sort data. By triggering automations whenever a new record appears in a given view, you can define precise parameters to start and control your automations in Zapier and Integromat, making sure that automations only run under the exact conditions you define. 

Airtable also offers out-of-the-box support to sync with Salesforce, which can be extremely useful if you already have a lot of data living there. With Airtable, you can pull in data from Salesforce to trigger automations while still letting your team work within Salesforce.

You can start trying Airtable with a free account at airtable.com 

Build complex custom automations with Integromat

There are many great low-code automation platforms out there, but one of the best apps for larger and growing companies is Integromat. 

Integromat lets you build automated “scenarios” that perform actions in nearly any software based on a specified triggering event. Compared with similar tools, Integromat is a highly technical option that lets users make custom API calls, parse data with regex, and build custom integrations to automate any app that you’d like to use. 

Though it’s not as easily accessible as other low-code automation tools like Zapier, Integromat is a great choice for those with some background in coding or software development. 

With its versatile features, Integromat offers a high level of flexibility and control that make it well-suited to enterprise use. It’s particularly useful for building relatively complex workflows that connect with lots of different apps and touch many different departments at your company. At XRay, we’ve even used Integromat to build automations that publish web pages with custom stripe products. 

If you’re looking to amplify the output of your team and make your processes more consistent with automated workflows, Integromat may be a great choice for your company. 

Learn more about integromat at integromat.com

Automate workflows at any scale

Automation’s ability to multiply output and capacity has often made it a particularly attractive option for small teams looking to amplify their productivity, but with the right tools, automation can deliver results for companies of any size. 

With platforms like Unito, Airtable, and Integromat, enterprise users can manage massive and complex datasets, build versatile and highly technical custom automations, and control those automations from a centralized database. 

If you’d like to learn more about how automation can help your company to save time and create more consistent processes, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.