The most important concept in Design Studio is a robot. A robot is a program designed to accomplish some task involving a data source, usually a web site, but it could also be an Excel document or a database. Typically, one robot is written per task per data source. For example, you would create one robot for extracting news from http://cnn.com, another robot for extracting news from http://yahoo.com and yet another robot for extracting product information from an online product catalog.

Basically, a robot can be programmed to do (automatically) everything you can do in a browser, and to extract data from a database or an Excel document to combine with data stored in a database or file.