Why validate before importing?
CRMs, e-commerce platforms and databases reject rows that don't fit their schema — or worse, they silently skip them. A failed import that drops 200 contacts without telling you is hard to debug after the fact.
Validating before you import catches the problems you can fix: missing emails, phone numbers in the wrong format, prices stored as text, dates that aren't dates, and status values that aren't in the system's allowed list.
How the validation engine works
Each rule is compiled into a fast checker that runs over every row. Missing columns are reported but don't crash the validation. Required checks run first (an empty value is 'missing', not 'invalid'). Unique checks track values as they appear — the first occurrence is valid, later ones are duplicates.
The annotated file adds two columns at the end: 'Validation status' (valid, invalid, missing, duplicate) and 'Validation errors' (a semicolon-separated list of what went wrong). You can filter or sort by status in Excel to find the rows that need attention.