Your First 15 Minutes

~15 minutes · sign in, get oriented, run your first example

This is the session every other tutorial assumes you’ve had. You’ll sign in, learn where projects, workflows, data, and dashboards live, then open a ready-made workflow, run it, and see a result come out the other side. No building from scratch yet — that’s the Quickstart, which this page complements. Think of this as the map before the road trip.

You’ll need a workspace. If you don’t have one, start a free trial — it provisions a workspace in a few minutes. Everything below happens inside it.

How PlaidCloud Is Organized

Three words explain almost everything you’ll see. Your account lives in an organization (the billing and identity boundary). Inside it are one or more workspaces — isolated environments where work actually happens. Inside a workspace are projects, and each project owns its own tables, workflows, dimensions, and history. Projects don’t share state with each other.

Sign in, land on the Launcher, open a project — and everything you work with lives on tabs inside it.

The full data model — connections, views, dimensions, allocations — is laid out in Concepts. You don’t need all of it today; the three words above are enough to find your way around.

Step 1: Sign In and Meet the Launcher

Open your workspace URL (something like https://acme.plaid.cloud) and sign in — your exact URL is in your welcome or trial email, and also on your organization page. The first thing you land on is the Launcher — a single page of tiles that gathers what you work with most so you can pick up where you left off. From here, Analyze is the app area where your projects, workflows, tables, and dashboards live; you’ll spend most of this session inside it.

The Launcher is organized into three lanes, top to bottom. A lane only appears when it has something to show:

Lane	What it holds
Needs attention	Workflows whose most recent run failed — problems surface the moment you land
Pinned	Everything you’ve starred as a favorite, in the order you pinned it
Recent	Projects, dashboards, and panel apps you’ve opened or edited lately

On a brand-new workspace these lanes are mostly empty — that’s expected. As you work, they fill in. Full detail is in the Launcher guide.

Two shortcuts worth learning now. Press Ctrl/Cmd-K to search projects, workflows, tables, dashboards, and panel apps from anywhere. Click the star on any card to pin it to the Pinned lane so it never scrolls out of reach.

Step 2: Get Oriented — Where Things Live

Everything in PlaidCloud lives inside a project, and a project presents its contents on tabs. You’ll return to these constantly:

Where	What you’ll find
Projects	Every project in the workspace; open one to work inside it
Workflows	The pipelines that import, transform, and publish data
Tables	The structured data — rows and columns — that workflows read and write
Dashboards	Published, interactive views built from tables
AI Assistant	A project-scoped chat for asking questions about your data and workflows

The mental model to carry forward: a workflow is a sequence of steps, each step reads from one or more source tables and writes to a target table — leaving the originals intact. A dashboard reads the tables a workflow publishes. That’s the loop you’ll see over and over.

Step 3: Open a Ready-Made Example

Rather than build anything yet, open something that already runs and watch it work.

1. From the Launcher or Analyze → Projects, open a project. If your trial workspace came seeded with a sample project, open that — if the Projects tab is empty, none was seeded, so run through the Quickstart once to create a small project and workflow, then come back here. The rest of this page works the same either way.
2. Switch to the Workflows tab inside the project.
3. Double-click a workflow to open the Workflow Explorer. You’ll see its steps laid out in order — imports on the left, transforms and publishes flowing to the right.
4. Click into a single step to see how it’s configured: its source table, its target table, and its options. You don’t need to change anything — you’re reading, not editing.

Reading before running is a good habit. Skimming a workflow’s steps before you run it tells you what tables it will touch and what it will produce — so the result won’t be a surprise.

Step 4: Run It and See a Result

Now make it do something.

1. In the Workflow Explorer, click Run on the whole workflow (not just one step).
2. Watch the log as each step executes in order. Each line tells you which step ran and whether it succeeded.
3. When the run finishes, switch to the Tables tab. The workflow’s output table is there — click into it and you should see rows populating the grid: the actual rows and columns the workflow just produced. Rows in that table are your visible sign of success.

That table is your result: real data that a workflow just created from its sources. If the workflow ended with a publish step, that output is now reachable by Dashboards and other consumers too.

If a step turns red, that’s fine for now. A failed run also shows up in the Launcher’s Needs attention lane. When you’re ready to fix one, the Fix a Workflow With the AI Assistant tutorial walks through diagnosing and repairing a failure — you don’t have to solve it in this session.

Step 5: Ask a Question (Optional)

Every project has a built-in AI Assistant — a chat scoped to that project’s data and workflows. Open it and ask something plain, like what tables are in this project? or what did that last workflow produce? It’s the fastest way to get your bearings in an unfamiliar project, and conversations persist per project so you can pick a thread back up later.

You’ve Got the Map

In fifteen minutes you’ve done the things every later tutorial takes for granted: signed in, found your way around the Launcher and a project’s tabs, and run a workflow from start to finished result. From here, each tutorial builds on exactly this loop — connect data, shape it, model it, show it.

Where to Go Next

• The reference version of this — Quickstart builds a small workflow from scratch, step by step, as a lookup you can return to.
• The vocabulary — Concepts defines every term you met today and a few you didn’t yet.
• Your first real build — CSV to Answer takes a single file all the way to an answer, and Load, Transform, and Publish Data is the full end-to-end pipeline.
• The whole path — Tutorials lists the scenarios in the order data moves through the platform.