Cell Editing

Editing cells.

Editing One Cell at A Time

To edit a cell, hover your mouse over that cell. You should see a tiny blue button labeled "edit". Click it to edit the cell. That pops up a window with a bigger text field for you to edit.

When done, click "Apply" or press Enter. That changes that one cell. On the other hand, if you click "Apply to All Identical Cells" or press Ctrl-Enter, then for all cells in that column that contain the same text (to that cell) originally, they will all be replaced with the new value that you just entered. It's essentially a Find & Replace operation.

You could set the data type of the cell in the popup. For dates, we support ISO 8601 as well as more readable strings, such as "today" and "yesterday". Readable strings can be whatever that the library datejs can parse.

Editing through Text Facets

You could also edit cells in a column sharing some common value using a default text facet created on that column. First, create a default text facet on that column. Then locate that value choice in the facet and hover your mouse over it. An "edit" link will appear next to the choice. Click it to get a popup. As this is a text facet, OpenRefine will only let you enter a text string.

Editing through a text facet performs a find and replace operation. Consider a data set with a column of people's names. Creating a text facet on that column might yield something like this:

choice	count
Andy Anderson	79
Andy R. Anderson	9
Beatrice Beaufort	28
Cindy Mansfield	67
...	...

If you click "edit" on the choice "Andy R. Anderson" in the facet and enter "Andy Anderson", what that does is to go over each cell in that name column that contains the string "Andy R. Anderson" and replaces it with the string "Andy Anderson". Nine (9) such cells will be changed, and no cell in that column will contain "Andy R. Anderson", but 9 more cells will contain "Andy Anderson". As a result, the text facet will be updated to show 88 "Andy Anderson"; and "Andy R. Anderson" will disappear:

choice	count
Andy Anderson	88
Beatrice Beaufort	28
Cindy Mansfield	67
...	...

Editing by Transforming

The most common way to edit cells in a column in OpenRefine is by invoking the Transform command on that column: from the column's drop-down menu, pick Edit cells > Transform ... In the dialog box, you enter an expression that gets evaluated on each row to compute the new cell value for that row. For example, consider this data set

name	age
John Smith	28
Jane Doe	33

Say we invoke the Transform command on the name column and enter the expression

  value.split(" ").reverse().join(", ")

This causes OpenRefine to iterate through each of the 2 rows, and for each row, set the variable value to the row's cell in column "name", evaluate the expression, and put the result back into that cell. More specifically,

• when OpenRefine processes row 1, it sets value to the string John Smith, splits that string into 2 strings (John and Smith), reverses those two strings (Smith and John), joins them back to yield Smith, John, and puts that string into that cell.
• when OpenRefine processes row 2, it sets value to the string Jane Doe, splits that string into 2 strings (Jane and Doe), reverses those two strings (Doe and Jane), joins them back to yield Doe, Jane, and puts that string into that cell.

When you click OK, the data set will become

name	age
Smith, John	28
Doe, Jane	33

For more information on expressions, see Understanding Expressions.

Splitting Multiple Values within Cells to produce Records

OpenRefine has a feature called Split multi-valued cells that can essentially create fields similar to a database record. Take the following example,

name	data type	data record
Kate Moss	Person	profession:Model,href:"/0122-kate-moss",title="Kate Moss",hair:brown
Marilyn Monroe	Person	profession:Actor,href:"/1488-marilyn-monroe",title="Marilyn Monroe",hair:blond

The 'data record' column has several fields that need to be split, but we do not necessarily want to create additional columns, instead we want those individual 'fields' for each Person record, since that seems to be how this dataset is arranged. We can use Edit Cells -> Split multi-valued cells... on the 'data record' column using the comma , separator character. After applying, our table in OpenRefine now looks like this and you are taken from rows mode into records mode which is shown just above the All column,

---

Show as: rows records Show: 5 10 25 50 records

All	name	data type	data record
	Kate Moss	Person	profession:Model
			href:"/0122-kate-moss"
			title="Kate Moss"
			hair:brown
	Marilyn Monroe	Person	profession:Actor
			href:"/1488-marilyn-monroe"
			title="Marilyn Monroe"
			hair:blond

NOTE: You can split multi-valued cells on any column and even export those records, keeping the record format, but be aware of the current record model handling in OpenRefine 2.5 and prior: the left-most column is always the "key column" for the record set. If you move columns to the left-most column (the beginning), this will break the underlying record model. However, breakage is only because we have not yet incorporated support for interactive column grouping. (but planned for in a future release)

Comparison with Spreadsheets Software

Expressions in OpenRefine differ from formulas in popular spreadsheet software. In spreadsheets, formulas are entered into cells. That is, a cell can contain a formula (the formula is computed and its result is displayed in the cell). In OpenRefine, cells do not contain expressions. Rather, any expression you specify is evaluated to compute a value that is then stored into the cell. If the expression depends on other cells, and the other cells get changed later on, the expression is not evaluated again. Each transformation is done only once, not updated constantly.

Also, in spreadsheets, you have to copy formulas from one cell to other cells (typically using the Fill Down command or dragging down the selection rectangle from its bottom right corner). In OpenRefine, there is no copying of expressions. Rather, an expression is applied to rows that are currently shown, as determined by constraints in facets and filters.

Editing by Clustering

Perhaps the most powerful way to edit cells is through the Clustering feature, but that deserves a whole page of its own.