Activity Palette
The palette is the panel on the left side of the Designer. It’s your catalog: it contains all the activities you can use, grouped by package. Building a playbook consists, in large part, of finding the right activity here and dragging it to canvas.
What is an activity
Section titled “What is an activity”An activity is the minimum block of work: it does a specific action. For example:
- Open Browser opens a browser.
- Excel Read Range reads a range of cells.
- SMTP Send sends an email.
- If decide entre dos caminos.
Each activity has a visible title (e.g. “Open Browser”) and a technical type (e.g. browser-open). In the documentation you will see both; In the palette you search for either of the two.
Search for an activity
Section titled “Search for an activity”At the top of the palette there is a finder. Start typing and the list is filtered live, as you type, by name or type:
- Type
excel→ you see all the activities in the Excel package. - Type
read→ you see all read activities for any package (Excel Read Range, Read CSV, Read File, Read JSON…). - Type
browser-open→ you find the activity by its exact technical type.
Organization by package
Section titled “Organization by package”The activities are grouped into packages, each with its icon and color:
| Package | What is it for? |
|---|---|
| Core | Flow logic: variables, conditions, loops, logs, error handling |
| Browser | Web Automation (Chrome/Edge): Navigate, Click, Fill Forms, Extract Data |
| Desktop | Windows Desktop Application Automation |
| Excel / Word | Office documents |
| Files | Archivos y carpetas |
| Data Table | Manipulating data tables |
| HTTP / Database / SFTP | Integrations with APIs, databases and servers |
| Outlook / SMTP | |
| PDF / OCR | PDF documents and text recognition in images |
The complete catalog, with each activity documented, is in Activities.
Click a package name to collapse or expand its list. Collapsing the packs you don’t use keeps the palette tidy.
Add an activity to the canvas
Section titled “Add an activity to the canvas”Tienes dos formas:
- Drag and Drop: Take the activity from the palette and drop it to the desired position on the canvas.
- Double click: Adds the activity to the end of the current flow.
Once on the canvas, select the node to configure it in the [properties] panel (/designer/overview/#propiedades-3).
Why doesn’t a package appear?
Section titled “Why doesn’t a package appear?”The palette shows only the packages installed on the Agent of your machine. If you are expecting a package and don’t see it:
| Causa | Solution |
|---|---|
| The package is not installed | Install it from Zoan Cloud → Packages |
| Agent is not running | Open the Zoan Agent (icon in the system tray) |
| Designer opened before connecting Agent | Restart the Designer once the Agent is connected |
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Canvas and nodes — what to do with the activity once on the canvas.
- Activity Catalog — complete reference for each activity.