Activity palette

The palette is the Activities view of the left panel (you pick it in the rail). It is your catalog: it holds every installed activity, grouped by package. Building a playbook is largely about finding the right activity here and bringing it to the canvas.

What an activity is

An activity is the smallest unit of work: it does one specific action. For example:

• Open Browser opens a browser.
• Read Excel Sheet reads an Excel sheet.
• Log writes a message to the console.
• If chooses between two paths.

Each activity has a display name (in your language) and a technical type (for example browser-open), shown in the Properties panel. Hovering over an activity in the palette shows its description.

Search for an activity

At the top of the palette is Filter activities. The list filters as you type and puts the closest matches first:

• Search by the name in English or Spanish: read and leer find the same activities.
• Search by the technical type: browser-open.
• Accents and capitalization don’t matter.

↓ from the search box moves to the first activity in the list.

Not sure which activity you need?

Think of the verb (open, read, write, send, click) and the system (Excel, browser, email). Search for either one. The activity catalog in this documentation groups everything by package with a description of each activity.

Organization

The palette starts with two groups of your own:

• Recent: the last activities you added, in order of use.
• Favorites: the ones you marked. Right-click an activity → Add to favorites (or Remove from favorites).

Then come the installed packages, in alphabetical order, each with its count. For example:

Package	What it is for
Core	Flow logic: variables, conditions, loops, logs, error handling, invoking playbooks
Browser	Web automation: navigate, click, fill in forms, extract data
Desktop	Windows desktop application automation
Excel / Word	Office documents
Files	Files and folders
Data Table	Data table manipulation
HTTP / Database / SFTP	Integrations with APIs, databases and servers
Outlook / SMTP	Email
PDF / OCR	PDF documents and text recognition in images

Package names are shown in the Designer’s language. The full catalog, with every activity documented, is in Activities.

Click a group name to collapse or expand it.

Headless projects

In a project with the headless platform, the palette hides the activities that only work on Windows (desktop, SAP, UI, OCR, Outlook) and a line at the top says how many are hidden. See Project settings.

Add an activity to the canvas

1. Drag and drop: take the activity from the palette and drop it where you want it on the canvas or inside a lane. A line shows where it will land.
2. With the keyboard: select the activity in the palette and press Enter. It goes right after the activity selected on the canvas.
3. With the command palette: Ctrl+K, type the name and press Enter. It also goes after the selected one.

Once on the canvas, select the activity to configure it in the Properties panel.

Why doesn’t a package show up?

The palette shows the packages installed on your computer. If you expect a package and don’t see it:

Cause	Solution
The package is not installed	Install it from the Package manager (rail → Packages, or ☰ → Tools → Package manager…). You need to be signed in to Zoan Cloud.
The project uses packages you don’t have	When you open the project while signed in, the Designer downloads the missing packages. Without a session, it tells you which ones are missing.
It is a headless project	Activities that only work on Windows are hidden on purpose (see above).
You just updated a package that was in use	Restart the Designer: until then its activities keep the previous version.

Note

The Package manager shows Installed packages, those Available in your environment and Updates, with a category filter. Installing a package makes it available on the whole computer.

Next steps

• Canvas and nodes: what to do with the activity once it is on the canvas.
• Activity catalog: full reference of every activity.