OpenRefine is a powerful free and open-source tool specifically designed to effectively clean, structure, enrich, and format (tabular) data. It has the potential to save endless hours of manual data correction and its functionality to track and record all changes can help with the reproducibility of research.  

This half-day online training will:

• introduce the basic functions of OpenRefine like filtering and sorting,
• show ways to identify and corrected errors in data sets,
• teach how to format data in a consistent and machine-readable way,
• show how to import and export data and the attached processing steps.

Participants will need to install OpenRefine before the workshop (guidance will be provided) and demonstrations and explanations will be alternating with small hands-on exercises done by the participants on their own machines with an example data set.

This workshop will be useful for any researcher working with large tabular data sets. Some familiarity with managing data in spreadsheets is assumed.

This workshop can be attended as part of the Researcher Development Programme, earning 1 credit towards the Researcher Development Digital Badge.

The workshop is based on Data Carpentry lessons.