Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How to save and export data from OpenRefine

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 desired format. Save your files with meaningful names, no spaces. OpenRefine 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’ (TSV) or ‘Comma-separated values’ (CSV) would be good choices.

That file will get exported to your default Download directory. That file can then be opened in a spreadsheet program or imported into programs like R or Python, which we’ll be discussing later in our workshop. Remember from our lesson on Spreadsheets that using widely-supported, non-proprietary file formats like TSV or CSV improves the ability of yourself and others to use your data.

Key Points

• Cleaned data or entire projects can be exported from OpenRefine.

• Projects can be shared with collaborators, enabling them to see, reproduce and check all data cleaning steps you performed.