Text may come in any format: an article, a tweet, a cell on a spreadsheet, etc. We refer to each instance of the above as "text", and if there are more than one, as "texts" or "text data".
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In order for MonkeyLearn to properly work with text data, it needs to be contained in a recognized way so that a module can access the piece of text inside: a recognizable set of data. 

MonkeyLearn should only be used if you already have the data readily available. Some data sources are already accessible through MonkeyLearn (see next image). Others datasets that are not listed here, might need to be primed for use.

Your data should be structured in a similar format to a spreadsheet; one column with different texts in each row. And, if necessary, another column or columns for existing tags. This format, although simple, can work with pretty much any kind of data. 

💥In general, the closer your data reflects this kind of structure, the more prepared it will be for use in MonkeyLearn. 

The first important question to consider is, where does your data come from? It may be a .csv or an excel file, it may be a list of tweets, support tickets or emails. It may come from live webpages on the internet. The source of your data will likely have a lot of impact on the format of your data and on the following questions.

The second question to ask is how easy is your data to access? If your data is already housed in a spreadsheet, that is going to be more easy to work with than if your data is currently contained in live webpages all over the internet. In this case, that data will have to be "scraped" off and translated into something similar to the format of rows and columns mentioned previously so that MonkeyLearn can access it.

A third question that might come into play is how clean is your data? Perhaps your texts come with a bunch of code or with some extra junk in them. It could be that some of the tags or categories are not applied correctly. There may be a situation where a number of columns need to be joined together to get all the samples into one cell (called "concatenation"). Ideally, all of this data cleaning would happen prior to trying to access it in MonkeyLearn.

This is all the more important when you are going to be creating a custom model, where your current texts are going to be used to build associations so the model can learn to make predictions about future texts. If your current data set is not clean, predictions about future texts won't be clean either.