Save & Export

Save and close a project

By default, OpenRefine saves your project continuously. To close OpenRefine close the browser tab and the terminal window.

To find a saved project, open OpenRefine and select Open Project tab, a list of projects will be available to select and open.

Export features

In OpenRefine you can export the cleaned data or the entire project. Exporting the project as a whole means you are saving the data and all the information about the cleaning and data transformation steps you have done.

You can export your cleaned data, with different file formats, for use in other tools for analysis.

Activity - export cleaned data
  • Click  Export  in the top right and select the file type for the data export. Tab-separated values (tsv) or Comma-separated values (csv) are good choices, as they are non-proprietary, but can easily be opened in programs like Excel, R, Python or the Unix shell.

Any exported file will be saved to your default  Download  directory.

You can also export project files as a whole. This is helpful if you wanted to send your raw data and cleaning steps to a collaborator, or share the information as a supplement to a publication.

Activity - export a project
  • 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 downloaded  tar.gz  file is 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 to expand the zip file.

Learn to export with this video.
Quiz 3. What files are in the exported project?

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?

Going Further

Want to continue your learning? Go to Advanced Data Wrangling with OpenRefine - 2 for more.

Was this tutorial helpful? Let us know.
Complete this quick survey