using columnName to bulk fill down columns

Thanks to this StackOverflow question, I finally found a great use case to introduce the columnName variable in OpenRefine. 

The columnName variable has been poorly documented (see previous discussions in SO and on the OpenRefine mailing list). The feature got really interesting with the All > Transform option available in OpenRefine 2.7 back in 2017 (yes, this blog post is long overdue!)

Read More

How to use Columnize by Key/Value

Based on the Wordpress export file in XML format shared by Adam K on the user mailing list the column item - wp:postmeta - wp:meta_key and item - wp:postmeta - wp:meta_value store data in a key:value format. The column meta_key indicates the value type and the column meta_value store the field value.

Read More

Data Shaping in Google Refine – Generating New Rows from Multiple Values in a Single Column

Data Shaping in Google Refine – Generating New Rows from Multiple Values in a Single Column

Great tutorial to reshape data set using transpose and fill down function. This article also introduce the split multi-valued cells function to split and transpose in one shot.

Read More

Fill down the right and secure way

The fill down function consists of taking the content of cells and copying down following blank cells. This is done based on the rows number. When you perform this action using the fill down function, Google refine does not take into account if rows belong to different records or not, if the following rows are blank, it will fill it down with the content of the previous row.

If you do not use this function with extra care you can easily corrupt the integrity of your data set. In a nutshell use  row.record.cells[columnName].value[0]   to fill down data within the same record. 

Here is why, and how to avoid that.

Read More