Notion AI to the Rescue: Effortlessly Classify Thousands of Data Rows

Background

Due to a family member's kidney condition, they need to strictly control their water intake. I found an Excel spreadsheet listing over a thousand types of food, including the food name and the water content per 100 grams:

My goal was to tag each food item with a category label — such as Seafood, Meat, Egg Products, etc. — so I could classify the foods and then generate a sorted chart of water content for each category.

I tried AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Doubao, and Kimi, but none of them could produce satisfactory classification results. The context was simply too long — they either couldn't output the complete result in one go, or they would hallucinate and generate unexpected answers. For a comparison of Notion AI and ChatGPT's differences and use cases, check out my Notion AI brief review.

So I decided to try solving this problem with Notion.

Solution

First, Notion allows you to upload a CSV file and convert it into a database:

After uploading, I got the database shown below:

Next, I created a Select field named "Food Category" and manually added the possible food category options:

Then I enabled the "Auto-fill with AI" option:

After that, I clicked on the field and selected "Update all pages":

Notion then calls AI to fill in the field using your preset options:

Here's the final result:

Advantages of Notion AI

In this data classification scenario, Notion AI demonstrated several clear advantages:

1. Strong batch processing capability: Unlike other AI tools, Notion AI can process thousands of entries at once without splitting them into batches, greatly improving efficiency.
2. High classification accuracy: By presetting category options, it avoids AI hallucinations and prevents irrelevant classification labels from being generated.
3. Simple and intuitive operation: The entire classification can be completed in just a few clicks — no coding or complex data processing workflows required.
4. Great result visualization: Once classification is done, you can create views directly in Notion to filter or sort by category, quickly gaining data insights. Combined with Notion's database charts feature, you can even display the classification results as bar charts or donut charts.
5. Easy error correction: If you find any individual classification that's inaccurate, you can manually fix it at any time without affecting other data.

Resources

If you need the original spreadsheet and the processed Notion table, you can click here to get them.

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