How to Use Automation in Your Editing Business, Part 2

Welcome, welcome! In the prior post about automation in editing businesses, we explored ways to use automation to set up response emails to client inquiries and how to create client and/or project folders. You don’t need to read that one to understand this one but do check it out if you’re interested in exploring those workflows.

This post is all about how to use automation to set up draft editorial reports using templates, but you could easily use the principles to set up other templated documents as well.

Let’s get to it!

The Third Automation: Set Up a Draft Client Editorial Report

Two of the most recognized documents used in editorial work are style sheets and editorial reports. Most editors have template documents for each, and an early step in any new project workflow is to set a copy of each specific to that project. If you can use Zapier to automate project folder setup, could you use it to do the same for those template documents? Turns out you can, with a notable asterisk depending on your preferred platform.

Here’s where it gets wild. Zapier supports more than 7,000 applications. Seven thousand! Do you know what application it doesn’t support?

Microsoft Word.

I know. I was baffled by it, too. You can use Google Docs and Google Drive as a workaround, though. And depending on how far you want to push the automation, you can get a Word doc without having to manually download the file from Google Drive. That requires building multiple smaller automations, so I’ll break each down into discrete sections to make it less overwhelming.

Housekeeping tasks

For the purposes of building and testing the automations, I created the following folders in my Google Drive:

“Client files” (parent folder)
- “Client document templates” (subfolder)
- “Google Doc editorial reports” (subfolder)
- “Word doc editorial reports” (subfolder)

I also created a testing folder called “Setup Ed Reports” in my OneDrive to store the Word documents transferred from Google Drive.

You don’t need to do this. It’s possible to build and test the automations by just saving files in your Google Drive and/or OneDrive. However, trust me when I say taking the time to create a folder structure will make building and testing the automations easier and faster. It makes cleanup a breeze, too—no hunting through all the files in your Google Drive or OneDrive to find and delete those testing files. And if you get everything working to your satisfaction, you’ll already have a usable structure you can easily adapt!

Readying the templates

For this series of automations to work, I needed to create and format my editorial report template in a very specific way. First and foremost, it needed to be a Google Doc. I easily converted it to a Google Doc after uploading it by opening it in Word and choosing “save as Google Docs” from the file menu.

Next, I needed to set up the template fields I wanted to autopopulate as part of the automation. Field names must be enclosed with curly brackets and the names themselves mustn’t contain spaces. For example, if I wanted to autopopulate a client name in my template, that field might look like this: {{ClientName}}.

Here’s a screenshot from my report of several fields that will autopopulate:

Example showing how to build templates in Google Docs using field names. It uses the project title and client name filed names.

Once I had defined fields throughout my document, I saved it in the “client document templates” folder I had created.

Creating the draft editorial report in Google Docs

A brief note: From here onward, the steps I’ll describe are specific to the tools I use. If you try out a similar automation, your setup may look different depending on your tools, needs, and process. Here’s what my automation to create the editorial report in Google Docs looks like:

Screenshot showing the four steps in the Zapier workflow automation to set up a draft editorial report after a project is updated in Moxie.

Initially, I had set the automation to trigger when a project was created in Moxie, but that didn’t work well. Not every project I work on needs an editorial report—for example, proofreading projects don’t need one—so I had to find a way to distinguish between project types. To do that, I created a custom project type dropdown in Moxie.

Screenshot of from Moxie that shows project type custom field highlighted.

Then, I created a filter in the Zapier workflow that allowed it to continue only if the word “edit” appeared in that custom field.

Detail of the Zapier filter that ensures project folders are only set up for certain project types (e.g., editing and proofreading).

Certain I had solved my problem, I ran a test and…it didn’t work. After several rounds of investigating, tweaking, and retesting (and, frankly, a lot of swearing on my part), I finally discovered the problem.

In Zapier, triggers are instant—they fire as soon as the trigger occurs—and actions are write—something is created or updated because of the trigger. When they say triggers are instant, they really mean it. The automation fired as soon as a project was created in Moxie, but the filter was stopping it from continuing. Why? Because I need to manually choose the project type, which means that field doesn’t have a value when the project is created; its value is set after the project is created.

That distinction is the difference between a trigger doing something when a project is created and when it’s updated. After changing the trigger and running another test, the workflow passed the filtering condition without issue.

Now, here’s where the housekeeping tasks I completed earlier come into play. As the automation moves beyond the filter, it searches Google Docs to find the template document. You can see I’ve defined both the document it’s searching for and the Google Drive folder in which it should search.

Screenshot showing details of Zapier automation used to find the editorial report Google Doc template on Google Drive.

Once it finds the template document, it then creates a new draft client editorial report using the template, autopopulates the defined fields, and saves a copy of the Google Doc under a new name in my Google Drive.

Screenshot showing details of automation to find and set up a draft client editorial report using a Google Doc template.

A couple of things to note in this step:

See the “3” in front of the ID number? Zapier allowed me to define the document ID using information it gathered while searching for the document in the prior step. (That’s step three from the automation, which is what the “3” before the ID number references.)
Any new draft editorial report created by this automation will follow the naming scheme: <Client Name> Editorial Report. I set that up using the client’s name from Moxie and adding “editorial report” after it in the “new document name” field.
See the highlighted fields at the bottom? That’s how and where I defined the report fields I want to autopopulate. This will pull the project title and client name from Moxie to replace the document’s {{ProjectTitle}} and {{ClientName}} fields, respectively.

When this automation finished, I had a draft report set up and saved in the “Google Docs Editorial Reports” folder in my Google Drive. I could download and save it as a Word document if I wanted to, and that would be the end of it.

But I wanted to push it a bit further.

Converting the Google Doc into a Word document

It turns out that Zapier will allow you to automatically convert Google Docs into other file types and save them! To give it a whirl, I built an automation to convert the draft editorial report from a Google Doc to a Word document.

Zapier workflow automation for converting a Google Doc into a Word Doc using Google Drive

For the automation to trigger, I needed to specify the folder where the files for conversion would be stored. I chose the “Google Doc Editorial Reports” folder, which is where the draft reports were saved during the prior automation.

Screenshot showing details of workflow to save a draft editorial report as a Google Doc in Google Drive

As soon as my draft report hit that folder, Zapier told Google Drive to grab it, convert it into a Word document, and upload it to a new file folder in my Google Drive. You can’t see it in the screenshot below, but when Zapier returns file information from Google Drive or Google Docs, includes all kinds of variables you can choose from. For example, it might say something like “File PDF” or “File Docx.” In my case, choosing the “File Docx” option told Google Drive to upload the new file as a Word document to the ”Word Doc Editorial Reports” folder. And just like that, I had a ready-to-download draft editorial report in Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs.

Check out this XRay Automation video on YouTube if you want to see a little more about the different types of file variables Zapier returns from Google Docs and Google Drive. Its focus is PDF files, but the process of searching for and choosing the correct file type is the same.

Screenshot of details from Zapier showing the trigger for converting a Google Doc into a Word Doc

But wait, there’s more!

Uploading draft editorial report to OneDrive

The final automation in my draft editorial report’s journey uploads the Word document to my OneDrive. Here’s the workflow setup:

Zapier automation workflow for transferring a file from Google Drive into OneDrive

Like the last automation, this one starts when a new file is saved in a Google Drive folder. However, this time it’s looking for files uploaded to the “Word Doc Editorial Reports” folder. That’s where the last automation saved the converted file.

So far, so good. But then things got a little wonky. The next step was to upload a copy of the new file to my OneDrive. Sounds simple, right? In theory it is. However, a small hiccup occurred that stumped me for a while: the file that ended up in the “Setup ed reports” folder in my OneDrive wasn’t a Word document. It was some indeterminate file type. Why didn’t it stay a Word document during the transfer?

Turns out it had to do with the kinds of file variables available. Look at the highlighted section in the screenshot below. Remember in the last automation that the available file type variables included “File PDF” and “File Docx”? Well, “File Docx” wasn’t available this time.

Screenshot showing details of workflow to convert a Google Doc to a Word Doc and save it to OneDrive

The automation was doing what I’d told it to do. I just hadn’t anticipated what would happen when I couldn’t choose a .docx format. Luckily, the solution was straightforward. I just appended “.docx” to the filename to preserve the Word document file type.

Detail of how to appended file name in automation to convert a Google Doc into a Word Doc

And, voilà! The Word document of my draft client editorial report is saved to my OneDrive.

Final Thoughts

Designing any kind of automation requires experimentation, testing, patience, and the right tools for the job (e.g., those that best fit your needs). While Zapier is my automation tool of choice, there are loads of others for you to check out. Give some thought to which of your processes are good candidates for automation and then start exploring the possibilities!