Hello and welcome to video number three of the beginner course of n8n. In this video, we'll be covering the node in n8n, which is the building block of all of your workflows.

Let's start off by looking into what an n8n node is and the different types and categories of n8n nodes.

The node is really the atom of n8n, and every workflow is built by connecting consecutive nodes. There are three main categories of nodes: entry points, which are going to be your triggers; functions that allow you to transform, filter, or format data; and exit points that are going to be your apps or applications.

As we mentioned before, in n8n you will find them grouped by type when adding them to the canvas: triggers, actions in app data transfer, information like filter flow files, and advanced nodes.

Here we have an example of the Google Sheets node. When you open n8n, you start on an empty canvas.

This is where we will be adding our nodes to build our workflows. We can click on the add first step or the plus button at the top right of our screen to add the first node.

In this case, because it is the first node of our workflow, we are prompted to add a trigger node. There are the same triggers that we mentioned in the first videos.

By clicking the onapp event option, we will see a list of applications that can be used to trigger the workflow.

For now, we can start by launching the workflow manually and therefore selecting the manually trigger. For all following nodes, we will have the list of different types of nodes, as you can see here.

Instead of scrolling through the list, you can also start typing the name of the node or application that you want to use to access it quickly.

When selecting the node, you will sometimes be prompted to pick a specific action from the list of available options, this is also called the operation.

Here we can see the Google Sheets node has different actions that are possible, such as append or update row, clear sheet, create sheet, delete sheet, etc. Once the node is on the canvas, you will be able to access its settings.

We can click the play button to execute the node, as well as common options like duplicating, renaming, deleting, etc. Double clicking the node will open its settings.

This is where we can set up the node for execution.

There are two types of configurations: the parameters, which are the default view when double clicking on a node. These are going to be specific to a given node and operation.

For example, selecting which spreadsheet and sheet we want to read data from when we select the get rows operation in Google Sheets.

As you can see here, the gear on the top right gives us access to advanced settings that are node independent, like notes or visuals and execution settings.

We will cover these in the advanced course. At the top of the parameters for each app node, there will be an option to set your credentials.

This is a very important concept to understand. This setting is how we authenticate to different applications and services, as mentioned in the APIs and web hooks video.

They are saved at an instance level to make sure workflow building is efficient and can be shared to specific users or workflows to ensure security around the accessibility of apps.

You can prevent specific people from having access to specific credentials. To the left and right of the notes parameters, we have input and output data.

This makes it easy to understand what data is being read as the input by the node and what is the associated output data.

Using an example Google sheet, we can see three main views. This is going to be the table view with the different columns and values.

Associated JSON view where we can see the output data as key value pairs. This is going to be the topic of our next video, and schema view where we can see all the different keys from the input and example of corresponding values.

Let's jump into n8n and see what all of this looks like. Here we are in n8n and we can see an empty canvas for our workflow, just as we saw in the slides.

Let's run through adding a Google sheet, reading its data, and looking through the different views in n8n.

So here we have a Google sheet that contains demo data. We have a column with first names, a column with last names, emails, and company names.

We can also see here that we have two sheets: one sheet named data and one sheet with company info. In n8n, we can click add first step, and as mentioned in the video, choose to trigger this workflow manually.

From here, we can either, using the plus button up here, select the next node, or clicking the plus button here, we can add a node that is connected automatically to this trigger.

Here I can choose action in app and look for Google Sheets, but it will be faster if we just type Google Sheets.

When I click on Google Sheets, I have access to all of the different actions and triggers associated.

In this case, we're going to get a row in the sheet, get one or multiple rows in the sheet because we want to read data from the Google sheet.

Here we can see that I already have a credential that is set up. These are, as mentioned earlier, saved at an instance level, but let me just create a new one for the example.

If I create a new credential, I can choose to use OAuth or a service account. In this case, OAuth will allow me to very easily and quickly connect and read data from this sheet.

with Google, and now I'm signed in. This means that n8n has access to all of the data in my, um, any in my Google Sheets account.

And now I can, um, choose the resource I want to act upon. So this is going to be a sheet within a document and the operation is going to be get rows.

If you decide you want to change your operation, you can also select from a list of given operations here. And now I'm going to select which document and sheet I want to read.

So here I have multiple options. I can either enter the URL or the ID. Um, the easiest here is going to be obviously to select from the list.

So here I can choose n8n demo data and then from again the list of sheets, I have the data sheet and the company info sheet.

So I'm going to select the data and execute the node. Here we can see to the right we have all of the information from the Google sheet as well as a column that contains data on the row number.

Um, all of the information that was in the sheet is now available here in n8n.

Fields that did not have values are going to be empty. This is, as we saw earlier, the table view, which is going to be, um, very useful when reading Google Sheets.

We also have the JSON view with each line corresponding to one JSON. Here again, we'll cover JSON in our next video and the schema view as mentioned earlier.

From here we can also access the node settings. Um, as mentioned a little bit earlier, these are going to be node independent, so whichever node, uh, you are accessing, these settings of these would always be the same.

We have, um, settings that depend on what the type of from here we can also access the node settings as mentioned earlier.

The node settings are node independent, so whichever node you are currently editing you will have the same node settings.

We have settings that uh pertain to the uh execution and output of the node. So the node can always output data or execute once um and not the number of times of.

From here we can also access the node settings uh as mentioned previously uh the settings are node independent and so no matter which workflow you are editing, you will have access to the same settings.

Um so in these settings have to do with the node execution or output.

Um so here we can always output data or decide to only execute once. Um also uh retry on fail.

This can be very useful when um using apps that behind the scenes uh actually use APIs and then we have error settings. What do we do in case of an error notes and if we want to display notes in the flow.

I'm adding a note to explain what the workflow does.

um helps a lot when trying to understand uh workflows. Here under the uh sheet settings, we have additional options. So I could decide for example to filter if I want the email uh to be a specific value or the first name to be a specific value and we have additional options such as data location, output formatting, or how to deal with filter that has multiple matches.

Uh many nodes are going to have additional settings that are available here at the bottom, additional filters or options.

For example, here we can also see the input data, which in this case is going to be empty because we using the when clicking test workflow, but when we're going to be building our workflows to the left, we're going to have our input data in again the table JSON or schema View and to the right, we're going to have our output data.

Thank you for listening to the third video of the n8n beginner course.

where we covered nodes and how to use them. In the next video, we'll dive deeper into what kind of data n8n nodes use, allowing us to understand the input and output of the nodes and how this data flows between different nodes, with our final goal being to create workflows.

n8n Beginner Course (3/9) - What are nodes?

n8n Beginner Course (3/9) - What are nodes?