Smart Upload lets you turn messy spreadsheets into beautiful visualization in minutes—without tedious and time-consuming data cleaning and prep.
When to use Smart Upload
You have two ways to get your data into mySidewalk:
Upload: A step-by-step guided process where you'll match your data to geographies, or elect to skip matching altogether (that's okay too). This option expects your file is already formatted with each row representing a unique geography or unique category. Perfect for when you want full control over how your data gets processed.
Smart Upload (Beta): Our AI assistant will automatically format your data and match everything to our geographic boundaries. Since it's in beta, the experience is still being refined and results may sometimes be imperfect, but it's a great starting point for complex datasets. Perfect for files with multiple categories, geographies, and/or time periods.
How to use Smart Upload
Drag-and-drop your file (csv, geojson) to initialize the upload process.
Smart Upload will tell you via chat its plan for processing your data.
Review the plan, ask it to adjust (if necessary), and tell it to proceed.
If Smart Upload gets stuck during its processing steps, it may ask questions. Respond to the questions to help it along. You can ask it questions, too.
When Smart Upload has completed processing and the file is ready, the Save Layer button will activate. Click the button to save the layer to your library.
File prep checklist
Over time Smart Upload will support increasingly complex uploads, but in this beta period, the steps below will improve your experience.
File format must be CSV (less than 5,000 rows) or GeoJSON.
Include only one table in the file.
One header, no footers, and no notes.
Every column should have a name.
No merged cells.
One data value per cell.
No mixed time groups (e.g. years and months).
Remove irrelevant and/or redundant columns.
If you don’t anticipate needing the column for visualization, remove it.
Remove confidence intervals.
At this time, Smart Upload doesn’t know how to relate to the associated data.
No time ranges (e.g. 2020-2024). It's fine to upload a file with time ranges, but Smart Upload will ask you to name a point in time. You can add the range to the layer description and in chart titles and footers. We'll support this in the future.
File examples
Check out our gallery of file examples with recorded demos that show you where to get data for your location (if it's a public data source), prepare the file, and upload.
Related Resources