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Using Formatter For Text, Dates, And Numbers-Teaching 2
Welcome to this teaching.
In the previous lesson, we introduced Formatter by Zapier and explained why it is useful in automation.
Now, we are going deeper into three important parts of Formatter:
Text Formatter
Date and Time Formatter
Number Formatter
These are the ones you will likely use often when building automations for real client workflows.
Let us start with Text Formatter.
Text Formatter helps you work with text data.
This means any information that comes in as words, names, sentences, emails, links, or written responses.
For example, someone may fill a form and enter their full name in capital letters.
Instead of:
Jane Doe
You may receive:
JANE DOE
If you are sending that name inside an email, it will not look clean or professional.
So you can use Text Formatter to capitalise it properly.
Text Formatter can help you:
Change text to lowercase.
Change text to uppercase.
Capitalise names properly.
Find and replace words.
Split text.
Extract emails.
Extract phone numbers.
Extract links.
Remove extra spaces.
Shorten long text.
Count words.
One very useful example is splitting a full name.
Let us say someone fills a form and enters:
Jane Doe
But in your email, you only want to say:
Hello Jane,
You can use Formatter to split the full name and pick only the first name.
This is very useful for personalising emails and messages.
Another example is Find and Replace.
Maybe someone enters “NY” in a form, but you want the full word “New York.”
Formatter can find “NY” and replace it with “New York.”
You can also use it to remove unwanted spaces.
Sometimes people fill forms and add spaces before or after their names.
That may look small, but when you are working with automation, small errors can affect how clean your output looks.
So Text Formatter helps you clean the text before sending it to the next step.
Now, let us talk about Date and Time Formatter.
Date and Time Formatter helps you work with dates.
Sometimes, the date coming from your trigger does not appear in a readable format.
For example, it may come in like this:
2026-02-10
But you want it to look like this:
February 10, 2026
Or:
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Date Formatter can help you change how the date appears.
You can also use it to add or subtract days.
For example, maybe someone fills a form today, and you want to send them a follow-up five days later.
Formatter can help you add five days to the original date.
So if the original date is February 10, Formatter can help you calculate February 15.
This is useful for reminders, follow-ups, appointment workflows, onboarding sequences, and scheduled messages.
You can use Date and Time Formatter to:
Change date format.
Add days.
Subtract days.
Compare dates.
Prepare follow-up dates.
Create reminder dates.
Make dates easier to read.
Now, let us move to Number Formatter.
Number Formatter helps you work with numeric data.
This includes prices, quantities, discounts, calculations, phone numbers, and currency.
For example, if a price comes in as:
150
You may want to format it as currency.
You can also use Number Formatter to perform calculations.
For example:
150 + 200 = 350
150 - 50 = 100
150 × 3 = 450
150 ÷ 3 = 50
This is useful when you are building automations for orders, invoices, course payments, product selections, discounts, bookings, or pricing workflows.
Let us say someone selects different training options in a form and each option has a different price.
You can use Formatter to calculate the total.
Or if you want to apply a discount, you can use Formatter to subtract the discount amount.
Number Formatter can also help with phone number formatting.
If a phone number comes in one format and you need it in another format before sending it to another app, Formatter can help prepare it.
The main thing to remember is this:
Formatter helps you prepare your data before it moves forward.
So before your data enters your email, CRM, spreadsheet, SMS tool, or document, Formatter helps make sure it looks the way you need it to look.
That is how your automation becomes cleaner.
That is how your workflow becomes more professional.
And that is how you reduce errors inside your Zap.
Your assignment for this teaching is this:
Create one practice record with:
A full name.
A date.
A price.
Then create three Formatter steps:
One to clean the name.
One to format the date.
One to calculate or format the price.
Practise it until you understand what each step does.
If you want to see everything demonstrated practically, watch the full video here: