Get the exact format you need: Konnectify’s Guide to Formatter

Are you overwhelmed with managing data from countless sources? You’re not alone. 

Whether it's customer information from CRMs, sales data from eCommerce platforms, or engagement metrics from social media, the sheer volume and variety of data can be overwhelming. Businesses lose $15 million yearly because of poor data quality, emphasizing a critical need for effective data management strategies. 

The challenge, however, isn't just about collecting data; it's about transforming it into a format ready for decision-making. Integrating apps often means wrestling with inconsistent data formats. 

Astonishingly, 90% of business leaders admit that their organizations spend more time managing data than actually using it to make decisions. There is an urgent need to make data more seamless so that companies can spend more time making decisions rather than spending weeks structuring data. 

This brings us to data formatting—a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of data management. Imagine a world where data from every application speaks the same language, aligns perfectly with your operational needs, and integrates seamlessly. That’s the promise of Konnectify’s in-built Formatter, engineered to add some more structure. 

It’s so effective we thought we would build a guide on this. Let’s understand what it is, why it is crucial, and how you can use it to tailor your data exactly how you (and your apps) need it. Make your workflows smoother and more efficient than ever. 

What is Formatter? What does it do?

Imagine a Swiss Army knife for your data; you get the exact format you want every time, irrespective of the SaaS app used. It doesn’t just transform your data from one app to another; it meticulously refines and reshapes it, ensuring it reaches the destination app in the precise format required. 

Whether you need names, dates, email addresses, currencies, time zones, or even complex blocks of text, Formatter’s versatility ensures that your data is formatted without manual intervention. 

So, imagine you’re working with a CRM like Freshsales to manage leads and QuickBooks for your invoicing. Here’s a common predicament we can face: The lead form collects names in a single field, whereas QuickBooks segregates them into first and last names. 

Enter Formatter. It will split names as data transits from Freshsales to QuickBooks, maintaining data integrity but significantly economizing on time. This automates what could otherwise be a manual, error-prone process—and this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

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In essence, Formatter by Konnectify doesn’t just simplify data formatting; it changes how businesses manage their data ecosystem. There’s so much more it can do. 

How does Formatter integrate with other apps? 

Formatter operates as an intermediary within Konnectify’s automation workflows (called Konnectors). When you select a trigger event in one app and aim to act for another, introducing a Formatter event in between ensures the data is passed along and translated into the necessary format. 

This tackles a prevalent challenge head-on: the mismatch of data formats across applications, which leads to errors, inefficiencies, and resource drain.

Formatter by Konnectify is not just versatile; it’s comprehensive, with a wide range of functionalities to transform your data across various platforms and applications. Here’s all that you can do

Split or manipulate text with Konnectify

Imagine manually splitting hundreds of customer names into first and last names for a mailing list or needing to capitalize the titles of numerous articles for a consistent look on your blog - this is where Formatter’s text manipulation shines.  It adeptly handles splitting full names into first and last names, changing the case of text, finding and replacing, pluralizing, and more, ensuring that your data maintains a clean, professional appearance, no matter its origin.

Let’s try it to solve a problem. Imagine your support team using Freshdesk to manage customer inquiries and Slack to communicate internally. You want to ensure that whenever a support ticket is created in Freshdesk, a notification is sent to a specific Slack channel. However, you notice that the ticket tiles often come in a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, which can be hard to read and identify. So, you want to standardize these for improved clarity - and it’s super easy. 

Here’s how you can do that with Konnectify, step-by-step: 

Step 1: Set up Trigger

You choose a Trigger app and event, in this case, Freshdesk and “New Ticket added,” respectively.

Step 2: Insert your Format Action

‍Choose the Formatter app, choosing “String operation” as the action type. No, you can choose which case you want to ensure each word in the ticket title starts with a capital letter. The Input is the “Ticket Tile” 

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Step 3: Add an Action 

Now, you add an action to send a message to a designated Slack channel. Map the capitalized ticket title as part of the message content and any other relevant ticket details you wish to include.

Step 4: Test the workflow

‍Try it for a few ticket titles to ensure Formatter does what you want, and then deploy it for live ticket notifications. 

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With Formatter, the possibilities for data manipulation and optimization are vast. It offers solutions for capitalization, lowercase and uppercase adjustments, and beyond, ensuring data is always ready for any task.

Extract data with Konnectify

With the amount of data we have, quickly sifting through information and extracting valuable data is indispensable. The challenge is critical, whether you're gathering email addresses for a marketing campaign, pulling URLs from customer feedback, or extracting phone numbers from a sales lead document. 

Here, the Formatter tool offers a straightforward solution to what can often become daunting. By automating data extraction, Formatter saves you time and ensures accuracy and efficiency in your workflows.

So, let’s imagine your IT support team uses Jira to manage incoming tickets. Submitted via email, these tickets often contain varied information and are formatted differently depending on the sender. This variability makes it challenging to quickly identify and prioritize issues, especially when specific keywords indicate urgent problems that need immediate attention, such as "system down" or "cannot log in."

So, with Formatter, you can extract specific keywords from ticket descriptions to streamline the categorization and prioritization process. Here’s the step by step 

Step 1: Identify keywords

‍Think of the keywords and phrases that indicate a ticket’s priority, such as “urgent,” “high priority,” “system down,” or “cannot log in.” 

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Step 2: Set up Trigger

Choose Jira as a trigger app and choose the event that matches the creation or updation of a ticket.

Step 3: Insert Formatter step

‍Add Formatter action, and choose “String operation” and “Find” as action types. Specify the part of the ticket where the keywords might appear, such as the title or description field. Configure the extraction rules to identify and pull out the keywords or phrases you’ve determined are essential for prioritization. 

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Step 4: Add an Action 

You can notify the relevant team or individual via email or Slack, ensuring the urgent tickets are immediately visible. 

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Step 5: Test the workflow and deploy

‍Before fully implementing, test the workflow with various ticket examples to ensure the extraction and categorization process works as expected.

With such workflows, businesses can significantly enhance operational efficiency, quickly pull relevant information from a sea of data, and accelerate decision-making. Whether streamlining lead generation or enhancing IT support ticketing, Formatter offers a flexible solution to meet your data extraction needs.

Reformat date or time: synchronize globally 

In the modern workplace, where virtual teams span continents, aligning schedules is more crucial than ever. This challenge is magnified by the myriad time zones each team member might reside in, turning scheduling a meeting into a complex puzzle. Here, you can easily reformat data and time with Konnectify’s Formatter. 

Imagine your company is rolling out a new global project that requires close collaboration between teams in different countries. You can use ClickUp to manage tasks and Google Calendar to schedule meetings and deadlines. The objective is to ensure that all team members clearly and consistently understand when tasks are due and meetings are scheduled, regardless of location.

To bridge the gap created by time zone differences, Formatter can standardize the dates and times from ClickUp tasks and Google Calendar events into a single time zone (e.g., UTC) before disseminating this information through Dynamics 365 or MS Teams. Here’s how you can do it 

Step 1: Define the Standard Time Zone‍

Decide on a standard time zone for all project-related schedules. UTC is often a universal standard to avoid daylight saving time adjustments.

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Step 2: Setup Trigger Events

Set up a Trigger in Konnectify whenever a new task is created in ClickUp.

Step 3: Insert Formatter for Date and Time Reformatting

‍Add the Formatter step, and choose “Date and Time Formatter” and “Format Date and Timed” as action types. Input the date/time from the ClickUp task due date. Configure Formatter to convert this date/time to the standard UTC format by choosing an input format and a desired output format (UTC) 

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Step 4: Pass on the date/time data

After Formatter processes the date/time, set up an action to update the corresponding task in Dynamics 365, create/update an event, or send a message in MS Teams using the standardized UTC date/time.

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Your global coordination is much more streamlined, and you can enhance synergy across different time zones. It might save a few minutes and relieve you of some errors, but among 500 people, that’s a lot of time saved. 

Convert Markdown to HTML to maintain efficiency. 

The transition from content creation to publication involves multiple steps, one of which may include converting Markdown documents to HTML. Many writers and content creators favor Markdown for its simplicity and ease of use, allowing them to focus on content rather than formatting. However, when it's time to publish, many platforms and websites require HTML. This is where Konnectify's Formatter becomes a game-changer, simplifying the conversion process and ensuring a smooth transition to publication.

Your content team prefers writing blog posts in Markdown due to the format's straightforward syntax and readability. Yet, your company's website, powered by Webflow, requires HTML content. This format mismatch can create a bottleneck in your publication process, delaying content release. You can do this easily with Konnectify. 

Step 1: Prepare your markdown document 

Ensure your content team's blog posts are finalized and saved in Markdown format. This step is crucial for maintaining a streamlined process.

Step 2: Set up Trigger Events

Although Konnectify integrates with various tools directly, you might need to set up a preliminary step depending on where your Markdown documents are stored. If they use a content management tool like DevRev, you can use a trigger when a document reaches a particular stage in your workflow.

Step 3: Insert Formatter for Markdown to HTML Conversion:

‍Add Formatter action, and choose “String operation” and “Convert Markdown to HTML” as action types. Input your Markdown content into Formatter. This setup will automatically convert the Markdown syntax into HTML tags, preserving the intended formatting.

Step 4: Set up the output destination

After conversion, set up an action to save the HTML file in a designated location or directly upload it to your Webflow site. Depending on your workflow, you may need an API call to automate the upload process.

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Now, test and deploy. You can convert Markdown to HTML, significantly enhancing efficiency and reducing time to publication. Nobody has to worry about learning webflow or going through a complicated publishing process anymore. This functionality is invaluable for teams working in dynamic content creation environments, such as blogging or web development, allowing creators to focus on what they do best: creating engaging content.

Through its capabilities for text manipulation, data extraction, date and time reformatting, Markdown to HTML conversion, and currency conversion, Formatter by Konnectify elevates data management to a new level of efficiency and accuracy. It's not merely about moving data from one application to another; it's about ensuring that data is precisely formatted for its subsequent use, whether communication, reporting, scheduling, or content creation.

Go on, get started with Formatter by Konnectify

Now that we've explored the transformative power of Formatter by Konnectify, covering everything from text manipulation to date and time reformatting and even Markdown to HTML conversion, it's time to embark on this journey of efficiency and precision. 

However, the utility of Konnectify continues with Formatter. The platform offers various built-in tools to complement and enhance your workflows further.

Beyond formatting - explore more with Konnectify 

You can do a lot more with your workflow automations: 

1. Filters: Filters act as gatekeepers in your workflows, ensuring that actions are only taken when certain conditions are met. This means you can fine-tune your automations to react to the most relevant data, enhancing efficiency and relevance. (Read the guide to Filters) 

2. Paths: Imagine creating multidirectional workflows to take different actions based on specified criteria. Paths allow you to do just that, enabling complex decision-making processes within your automations and ensuring the right action is taken at the right time.
   
   
3. Webhooks: Webhooks are helpful when connecting with external services or sending data in real time. They allow Konnectify to communicate with other web applications, sending or receiving data on the fly, opening up a world of integration possibilities.

Wrapping up

The journey from data chaos to clarity is not a solitary one. With Formatter by Konnectify, you can transform, refine, and optimize your data across many applications, ensuring it's always in the perfect form for your needs. 

Embrace efficiency and precision and transform your work with Konnectify. Whether you're a marketer looking to streamline campaigns, a content creator aiming for seamless publication, or an IT professional striving for operational excellence, Konnectify is your partner in navigating the complex digital landscape.

Discover the full potential of your data. Get Started for Free. 

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