Working with Open Refine

Learning Objectives

• Save an OpenRefine project.
• Export cleaned data from an OpenRefine project.

Lesson

Saving and Exporting a Project

In OpenRefine you can save or export the project. This means you’re saving the data and all the information about the cleaing steps you’ve done. Once you’ve saved a Project, you can open it up again and be just where you left off.

Saving

By default OpenRefine is saving your project. If you close OpenRefine and open it up again, you’ll see a list of your projects. You can click on any one of them to open it up again.

Exporting

You can also export a project, for instance if you wanted to send it to someone else.

  - Go to the 'Export' button in the top right. Click 'Export project'. This will save a compressed file that you can then open in OpenRefine that contains all the data and steps. 

Exporting Cleaned Data

Save your work when you are done by exporting it in the desire format. Save your files with meaningful names, no spaces. Refine does not change your original dataset (hooray!).

  - Go to 'Export' in the top right. Click on the file type you want to export the data in. 'Tab-separated values' or 'Comma-separated values' would be good choices. 

That file will get exported to your default Download directory. That file can then be eaily opened in a spreadsheet program or imported into programs like R or Python.

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