OpenRefine (former Google Refine) is a formatting tool very useful in data cleansing, data exploration, and data transformation. It is an open source web application which runs directly on your computer skipping the problem of uploading delicate information to an external server.
To start working with OpenRefine just run the application and open a browser typing the URL:
http://127.0.0.1:3333/
First, we need to upload our data and click on Create Project. In the following screenshot, we can observe our dataset; in this case, we will use the monthly sales of an alcoholic beverages company. The dataset format is an MS Excel (.xlsx
) worksheet with 160 rows.
We can download the original MS Excel file and the OpenRefine project from the author's GitHub repository:
https://github.com/hmcuesta/PDA_Book/tree/master/Chapter2/