Learn → Column roles
Prism reads your headers and data and assigns every column one of seven roles. Almost everything else — which quality checks run, which charts appear, what you can group by — follows from that decision. It is worth thirty seconds of your attention on any new file.
Roles are detected automatically and can always be overriddenA spreadsheet does not say what its columns mean. A column of digits could be an invoice number, a quantity, or a dollar amount, and the right treatment differs completely: an invoice number should be checked for duplicates and never averaged, while an amount should be totalled and checked for outliers.
Prism infers this from the header text and the shape of the values. It is right most of the time. When something looks wrong on the dashboard — a chart with one enormous bar, a total that means nothing, a missing time series — a misread role is nearly always the cause. Fix it in the Configuration view and everything downstream re-derives.
The primary key — a unique code or reference that identifies each record.
Examples: Invoice Number, Employee ID, Order Number, SKU, Serial Number, Asset ID.
This is the role that powers the duplicate-invoice check, so it is the one most worth getting right on a finance file.
A date or timestamp — when something happened, was created, expires, or is due.
Examples: Invoice Date, Due Date, Start Date, Expiry Date, Hire Date.
A monetary value — price, cost, salary, revenue, or any financial figure.
Examples: Invoice Amount, Unit Cost, Revenue, Budget, Salary.
A numeric quantity that is not money — counts, scores, ages, durations, ratings.
Examples: Quantity, Age, Score, Rating, Duration in days, Reorder Level.
A grouping field with a repeating set of values. Use it for anything you want to report or filter by.
Examples: Status, Department, Supplier, Priority, Region, Assigned To.
Category columns are also where the capitalisation checks earn their keep — Active and active splitting one group into two is a quiet way for a report to come out wrong.
Free-form or descriptive text — names, notes, addresses, contact details, or any field not used for grouping or calculation.
Examples: Supplier Name, Description, Notes, Address, Email, Phone.
Excluded from analysis entirely — quality checks, dashboard, pivot, dimensions and reports all skip the column.
Examples: internal notes, legacy codes, columns duplicated from another system.
This is the honest answer to a noisy column. Rather than have every review flag the same known-empty legacy field, mark it Ignore — and because it is still listed as ignored rather than hidden, nobody later mistakes an excluded column for one that was never there.
Open Configuration in the sidebar and change the role on any column. Everything re-derives immediately: checks re-run, charts rebuild, the score updates.
If a file arrives with a banner suggesting you review the configuration, that is Prism saying its confidence was low on at least one column — worth a look before you read anything into the results.
| Symptom | Usual cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A meaningless "total" of a reference column | An all-digits identifier read as Number | Set it to Identifier — it also switches on the duplicate check |
| No time-series chart on the dashboard | The date column was read as Text, so nothing pairs with the amount | Set it to Date / Time |
| A filter dropdown with thousands of entries | A near-unique column read as Category | Set it to Text, or Identifier if it is the key |
| Amounts not formatted as money | Read as Number because the source had no currency symbols | Set it to Currency |
Load a file and check its roles. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to create.
Open Prism →