Common Transformations in OpenRefine
Transformations are a powerful aspect of OpenRefine. Some common transformations are pre-loaded into the system such as trimming leading and training whitespace, changing all text in a cell to Title case (capitalizing the first letter of all words), Upper case, or Lower case, or transforming the format of the values in cells to number, date, or text.
To demonstrate how the trimming whitespace transformation works, go to the Other_Diagnosis column in the sample dataset and, from the drop down arrow, choose Facet, then Text Facet. There should be 938 choices. Scroll down the list until LOW BACK PAIN is near the top.
Notice that there are two seemingly identical entries for LOW BACK PAIN. The only difference is that the one with only two occurrences has an extra space at the end. By running the Trim leading and trailing whitespace transformation outlined above, the extra space will automatically be deleted and the incorrect entries will be joined up with the others, to make a total of 120 instances of LOW BACK PAIN.
