Do more with DATA by exploring DATA Wiki & All DATA Shortcuts Documentation
This page is for building shortcuts, but the guidance about prompting also applies to the chat.heydata.org interface where you can use all these same tricks in the chat interface, by text or email, or in Zapier automations as shown on our chat welcome video.
However, if you would like a better primer on writing code for data rather than building drag-and-drop shortcuts, you can explore our
If you search in your shortcuts, you can pull up a shortcut called “DATA Command Template
The data command template is a shortcut that's not intended to run. In fact, I've never run it and I'm not really sure what it does.
It is intended for you to duplicate and edit the prompts so it DOES do something!
If you open it and edit it, you'll notice that it is heavily commented and every section is fully described so you can understand what it does.
The goal is for you to be able to duplicate this shortcut and customize the prompts within it so that it works exactly how you want it, and that way it's easy for you to make a new command.
So if you've been thinking about something you want data to be able to do, I highly recommend you start with this shortcut, duplicate it, and then just work your way through block by block, customizing the prompts so that it works like you want it to work.
This gives you a great template to start from and will save you a lot of the work of building a lot of the custom functions that make data commands so powerful.
You should NEVER edit Activate DATA, because every other feature and shortcut relies on it working a very specific way.
Instead, you can easily and quickly customize Activate DATA (and most other DATA commands shortcuts!) by using them as a “run shortcut” blocks that call the command you want to use with a certain input within a new shortcut you build.
Here’s what that looks like, and see the screenshot for what this looks like in shortcuts:
ASK:
Example Request Here
Please note that you should ONLY use customized shortcuts like the examples below for requests you want to schedule or make on a regular basis — these allow you to have DATA perform complex tasks repeatedly with the tap of a button, or with any other shortcut trigger iOS allows.
Creating an Agriculture Update shortcut with DATA.
For regular DATA requests or one-off questions or commands, please just ask DATA directly via the Hey DATA (spoken) or Activate DATA (written) shortcut.
For almost every other request you can just use this format — speak or type directly into DATA, don’t worry about flags or settings.
Hi DATA, what can you do?
But if you DO want to learn how to become a DATA Creator, read the rest of this guide below.
As a general principle for building DATA compatible shortcuts, your shortcut should not use the Clipboard because it will interfere with other shortcuts that are running at the same time, and it should use a single version of Clipboard-Copy.txt that it reads and copies to a variable at the very beginning of the file so you don’t risk other commands saving to that file and confusing DATA along the way. At the end of your shortcut, if you’d like DATA to be aware of what the shortcut did, you can do that by appending plain language describing the shorcut output to the last line in Clipboard-Copy.txt, and DATA will automatically reference it in its next reply.
To make your own command, just make a shortcut (or duplicate DATA Command Template), and then write out how DATA should use it in Commands.txt to enable DATA to use it as a skill — Drop down this line for examples of every kind of DATA custom prompt you can run.
Here’s a walkthrough of exactly how that works:
https://twitter.com/SteveMoraco/status/1675269335374516224?s=20
I have built many “flags” (like ASK:) that allow you to customizing DATA’s output and decide whether it should be stored in memory. This allows you to use DATA and it’s current state as basically a block of code you can put anywhere and have it do anything.