Intro to Parabola University & basics

Welcome to Parabola University!

Parabola is a logic builder that allows you to combine data from across your company to create automated processes—all without writing code. Operators at companies like Chubbies, Sonos, Flexport, and Uber Freight have used Parabola to make an outsized impact by operating in ways that were previously only possible for software engineers.

By completing this course (which takes about an hour), you’ll go from a spreadsheet warrior to an automation expert, capable of solving critical business challenges like never before.

What You’ll Learn

In this course, we’ll cover the essential basics you need to build your first automated workflow in Parabola. You’ll learn how to:

• Load data from different sources into Parabola
• Use common data transformation steps to clean data, apply if/else logic, and perform math calculations
• Automate tasks that would otherwise require manual work in a spreadsheet
• Send data to different destinations, create databases, and build visualizations directly in Parabola

Future courses will dive deeper into additional steps, best practices, and troubleshooting techniques. For now, be sure to follow along with the building challenges associated with each lesson. The fastest way to learn Parabola is by doing—at the end of this course, you’ll have built a flow that analyzes sales data, cleans it up, and creates a dynamic sales dashboard tracking revenue over time.

Is Parabola Right for You?

Before diving in, it’s important to make sure Parabola is the right tool for your needs. Teams turn to Parabola when they:

• Have data spread across multiple systems, making it difficult to gain visibility and take action in real time
• Lack engineering resources and need a way to scale operations without adding headcount
• Want to leverage AI but are too bogged down with day-to-day tasks to explore new technologies

Parabola helps teams automate manual processes across emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs—while also improving workflows, incorporating AI, and scaling operations efficiently.

How Parabola Works

Let’s imagine you want to create a dashboard tracking units sold across different products. In Parabola, this would involve:

1. Gathering data from various sources like Google Sheets, Shopify, emails, or PDFs
2. Applying transformation steps to clean, structure, and analyze the data (e.g., math calculations, if/else logic, standardization)
3. Leveraging AI-powered steps to extract text, categorize information, and standardize values at scale
4. Exporting and visualizing the data, whether that means sending updates to Slack, updating a Google Sheet or Shopify, or building a visualization inside Parabola

If you’re currently handling tasks manually in spreadsheets, emails, or PDFs, Parabola can likely help—and this course will show you how.

Getting Started

To begin, head to the Building Challenge section below. There, you’ll find a link to create the flow we’ll use throughout the course. As you progress through different lessons, be sure to scroll down and complete the corresponding building challenges. You’ll also find sections where you can check your work and ask any questions.

Thanks for joining Parabola University—let’s get started!