A Sheet (also called a schema in Portal 2.0 or a Data Template in Portal 3.0) is how you tell Flatfile how your processed data should look, so when data is uploaded Flatfile has something to check and validate the incoming data against.

Sheets are used to tell Flatfile the shape of your data: essentially, what types of data to expect in which columns and rows, and how that data is organized. A properly set up Sheet tells Flatfile how you expect incoming uploads to look and, when Flatfile finds something out of place, how to clean and sort out the mistakes.

In a way, Sheets are the base that the rest of our features are built on. Data Hooks®, one of our most powerful tools, are connected to Sheets. You set the expectations for your data with a Sheet, and use a Data Hook to validate and reformat what comes in until it fits the format you need.

But it’s not just Data Hooks. Sheets are at the heart of the matching process, and our powerful matching algorithms can learn based on your past choices during the matching step, and make recommendations based on your previous decisions. And it all starts with a Sheet.