Video | Productivity | Data prep

Workflow App, Qunatified Self & Tableau

Workflow on iOS is basically Alteryx in your pocket for quantified-self tracking.

Tim Ngwena •3 November 2016 •1 min read •2 min watch •774

Workflow on iOS lets you build automations that run from widgets, the share sheet or the Apple Watch
The app works much like Alteryx - chaining inputs, variables, behaviours and outputs into a recipe
You can hook into Apple APIs and external services such as Google Sheets to capture and store data
Location can be pulled in automatically to add context to logged data, such as identifying which fuel station you're at
It's a flexible tool for quantified-self tracking, from logging water to recording fuel purchases

0:00So, let's take a look at workflow on the

0:03iPhone. They currently don't support

0:05Android, but

0:06the app is extremely well maintained on iOS

0:10. So here you can see in the widgets that I

0:13have a workflow widget and in there are

0:15some icons. I just clicked the log water

0:19workflow

0:20and now I've just clicked the walking Tobi

0:22workflow. So what these do is they do

0:25actions

0:25in the background. This one I've just

0:27clicked now is a better example where it

0:29actually

0:30fires up an app and inserts some pre-cal

0:32culated text from my health data. So this is

0:36a very

0:36simple example of what workflow can do.

0:39When we go into the app, you see that I've

0:41actually

0:41got quite a few of these apps and not all

0:43of them are in the widget and some of these

0:45work in the share extension sheet or on the

0:47Apple Watch. So let's take a look at the

0:50field tracker in more detail. What workflow

0:53is, is it's essentially a bunch of hookins

0:55into the Apple APIs and also other app APIs

0:58, so things like Google Sheets and so on and

1:01so forth. And it's literally like Altrix if

1:04you've used that before, a bunch of

1:06variables,

1:07inputs, outputs, behaviors as a result of

1:10that information and then finally you can

1:13output it to location. In this case, it

1:15triggers an if recipe that picks up the

1:17data and then

1:18puts that into Google Doc for me. And so I

1:20'm running it now. You can see that I'm

1:22entering

1:23information. Basically these prompts are

1:25pre-built into the workflow and as I enter

1:27information,

1:28it's capturing them, setting them as

1:31variables, then grabs my location to add

1:33some context

1:34to that so I can even narrow down which

1:36fuel station I'm fueling at. This is taking

1:39a while

1:39because I'm indoors but essentially once it

1:41's grabbed all the information, it pops up

1:45an

1:45information icon and then allows me to

1:48basically save that information to Google

1:51Sheets. So

1:52that's it, that's workflow and you can do

1:54this kind of thing with lots of different

1:56quantified self needs.

1:58[BLANK_AUDIO]

A brief demo of Workflow app showing how it can help improve manual logging for better analysis in Tableau. Visit the full blog post for more on this workflow.