The Dock & App drawer

Two panels do most of the work on the canvas. The Dock along the bottom is where steps come from. The App drawer on the right is where you configure the one you have selected.

The dock

The Dock holds everything you can add to a workflow, in five groups:

Group	What is in it
Apps	The third-party integration library: both triggers and actions live here.
Tools	Every built-in step, grouped by what it is for — see below.
AI	Language-model steps such as AI Prompt and AI Agent.
Subflows	Your other workflows, ready to call as a step. See Subflow.
Search	Find any app, trigger, or tool by name.

How Tools is organised

The Tools tab groups the built-in steps by the job they do, with a line under each group name saying what belongs there:

Group	What it holds
Start	What sets the workflow running: Scheduler, Click to start, Webhook and Chat Trigger.
Flow	Splitting the path, repeating steps, waiting for a person: Conditions, Switch, Filter, Repeater, Wait, Human Review, Stop and Error, Do Nothing.
Data	Everything that works on what the workflow carries, under four headings of its own.

Data is the one group with sub-headings:

Under Data	What it holds
Change	Reshaping a record: Summarize, Change fields, Date, Custom Variables, AI Data Transform.
Lists	Working on a list as a whole: Sort, Remove duplicates, Limit, Combine.
Convert	Turning one format into another: Parse JSON, HTML to text, Split Text, plus the Formatting and Helper Functions collections.
Dev tools	Talking to something outside Glow: HTTP Request, Code editor.

A search box under the groups finds any tool by name, so you never have to memorise the grouping.

A trigger from a third-party app, such as starting when a Google Doc is created, lives under Apps, together with that app’s actions. The Start group in Tools holds the built-in triggers only.

Run sits beside these rather than inside them: the button itself, plus a dropdown listing every step that can be the run point. See Testing & Debugging.

The right-click context menu offers the same groups wherever your cursor is. That is usually quicker once you know what you are looking for.

The App drawer

Click a step and the App drawer opens on the right. Most steps have three tabs:

Setup: the step’s parameters. Which account it uses, which action it performs, and how its inputs are mapped.
Executions: what this step produced on previous runs. See Step-level Executions.
Test & Debug: run this step on its own, edit its test data, and set its retry and error behaviour. See Error Handling.

The Chat Trigger replaces Test & Debug with Chat, where you send test messages and inspect the conversation. Flow-control steps that do not have independent test settings show Test & Debug as unavailable.

After a run, Executions is the fastest way to work out why the result was not what you expected. It shows exactly what the step returned; what it received is the step above’s output, on that step’s own Executions tab.

Annotations

The canvas is not only for steps. Three things can be dropped anywhere on it, none of which affect execution. They come from the Sticky Note & Media menu in the controls at the top right, or from the shortcut key:

Annotation	Shortcut	Use
Sticky note	`N`	Comments, open questions, or an explanation of awkward logic. Supports Markdown.
Image	`I`	Screenshots, architecture diagrams, reference designs.
YouTube video	`Y`	A walkthrough or recording, so context stays with the workflow.

These are what make a workflow readable to whoever opens it next, including you, months later. Everyone on the team sees them live, as covered in Real-Time Editing.

What’s Next?

Learn what a step is made of in Steps and Connections.
Reach the same menus faster with the Context Menu.