Jargon Buster

The online storage space provided with your iCloud account is called iCloudDrive. It makes your files available on all Macs and iOS devices signed in to the same account.

then either gives you the result or passes it to the next action in the chain for further work.

It’s up to you to pick out the actions that will help accomplish your overall task and add them to a workflow in the appropriate order. You can have as many actions as you like, but each must understand the output of the preceding one. For example, you couldn’t get an event from your calendar in one action and perform colour correction on it in the next, as there’d be no colours to work with.

Our workflow

In the six steps that follow we’re going to create a Print Plugin workflow that’s accessed when you choose File > Print or press ç+p. It will use the message that’s selected in Mail or the web page displayed in the browser as its input but, rather than sending it straight to the printer, it’ll first convert it into a PDF, give it a unique name so it doesn’t overwrite any other stored documents, and put it on iCloud Drive for safekeeping.

Our workflow doesn’t need any third‑party actions, only those provided with Yosemite and El Capitan. These systems are required to access iCloud Drive; if you’re running an earlier version of OS X, you could amend the closing steps to save the file to a folder that syncs with a service like Dropbox or OneDrive, or to a NAS (network attached storage) drive in your home or office.