Online OpenRefine Foundation Course

This course is no longer available.

For current OpenRefine courses and tutorials, see the external resources list maintained by the OpenRefine project.

The OpenRefine Foundation course was a free online program for people new to data cleaning and preparation. It covered the basics of OpenRefine and data manipulation in about 7 hours, across 23 instructional videos and 7 hands-on labs split into five lessons.

Lesson 1: Introduction to OpenRefine shows how OpenRefine will help with your data transformation and integration projects. You will learn about the community that supports OpenRefine and how to install the software.

Lesson 2: Data Mining & Discovery. Explore data sets to find data quality gaps or information nuggets. Learn how to use facets and filters, how to combine them and sort data better.

Lesson 3: Data Preparation & Normalization goes in-depth into actual data cleaning including removing duplicates, eliminating typos, splitting cells and using the undo/redo functions.

Lesson 4: Introduction to GREL. The General Refine Expression Language is OpenRefine’s scripting language, you will learn its syntax and most commonly used expressions for data cleaning.

Lesson 5: Data Enrichment explains how you can add value to your data by joining data sets together and use third parties services available via API.

It was developed in 2015 by Martin Magdinier in partnership with BigData University and Cognitive Class, to help new users pick up OpenRefine faster. For context on the wider training work, see RefinePro’s training and mentoring.