Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

How can we save and export our cleaned 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 cleaning and data transformation steps you’ve done locally on your computer. Once you’ve saved a project, you can open it up again and be just where you stopped before.

Saving

By default, OpenRefine is saving your project continuously. 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. This is helpful, for instance, if you want to send your raw data and cleaning steps to a collaborator, or share this information as a supplement to a publication.

Click the Export button in the top right and select OpenRefine project archive to file.
A tar.gz file will download to your default Download directory. Depending on your browser, you may have to confirm that you want to save the file. The tar.gz extension tells you that this is a compressed file. The downloaded tar.gz file is actually a folder of files which have been compressed. Linux and Mac machines will have software installed to automatically expand this type of file when you double-click on it. For Windows-based machines, you may have to install a utility like ‘7-zip’ in order to expand the file and see the files in the folder (this step is optional).
Optional: After you have expanded the file, look at the files that appear in this folder. What files are here? What information do you think these files contain?

Solution

You should see:

a history folder which contains a collection of zip files. Each of these files itself contains a change.txt file. These change.txt files are the records of each individual transformation that you did to your data.

a data.zip file. When expanded, this zip file includes a file called data.txt which is a copy of your raw data. You may also see other files.

You can import an existing project into OpenRefine by clicking Open... in the upper right > Import Project and selecting the tar.gz project file. This project will include all of the raw data and cleaning steps that were part of the original project.

Exporting Cleaned Data

You can also export just your cleaned data, rather than the entire project.

Click Export in the top right and select the file type you want to export the data in. In this case, we will choose Comma-separated value (csv).
The file will be exported to your default Download directory. That file can then be opened in a spreadsheet program or imported into programs like RStudio, which we’ll discuss later in our workshop.

Remember from our lesson on data organisation practices that using widely-supported, non-proprietary file formats like tsv or csv improves the ability for yourself and others to use your data.