Next, we’ll want to pull in the various data fields from the spreadsheet trigger and make them available in our playbook, so that we can use these to send a personalized welcome email as well as update our CRM (another spreadsheet).

Before we get to that, we’ll first learn a bit more about the Data tab.

About the Data tab

Every playbook has a Data tab. It let’s you do a few things:

• Manage Roles
• Manage Variables
• Manage external Data Sources

Specifically, it will let do the following with Roles and Variables:

• ✏️ Create new ones & edit existing ones
• 🔣 Set their default values
• 👀 See in which steps they’re used across the playbook
• ⚖️ Mark them as required (meaning that if they’re not set, runs won’t trigger/start)
• 🔗 Link or import them from a field in an external Data Source

We haven’t explained the concept of external Data Sources just yet. When you set up a Trigger to a third party application in a playbook (e.g. Google Sheets, Salesforce or Jira), it will show up as an external Data Source in the Data tab. Particularly, the Data Source is the specific row/record/entity that caused the run to trigger.

In case of a “newly added row” trigger for Google Sheets, this means that the Data Source is the row that triggered the run, and it will contain all the (column) values for that spreadsheet. Similarly, in case of a Salesforce trigger the data source is likely the Account record, and for a Jira trigger it’s likely the Issue, the Epic or a Release depending on the trigger configuration.