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Essential Spreadsheet Data Cleaning with OpenRefine

This guide accompanies the Galter Health Sciences Library class of the same name, or can be used on its own to learn a few essential data cleaning functions of the open source application OpenRefine.

Different Types of Facets in OpenRefine

Faceting data, or breaking out the unique values from all the cells of a column and displaying them for examination and cleaning, is one of the most powerful features of OpenRefine. Text faceting is the most common use of this feature, and is outlined in the Cleaning Spreadsheet Data with OpenRefine GalterGuide. The following sections will demonstrate other types of faceting that OpenRefine can do, such as Timeline, Scatterplot, and Numeric Faceting.