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!)

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OpenRefine April 2021 Review

For April we took the time to review all your favourite OpenRefine extensions for updates and checked for new ones! 

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Edit value from the facet

 

I just can't believe we have not yet published a tutorial for this essential OpenRefine feature! 

When you select the edit option from the facet menu, you can edit all matching values in a column, similar to a search and replace function. Of course, the update is recorded in OpenRefine history and can be replicated on a similar dataset.

You can use the edit using facet to quickly clean up typos or misspelled cells. It is also useful to address duplicates that are either not detected by the clustering feature or caught in larger clusters with irrelevant matches. 

In this video example below, we replace the value US  to United States for 45 cells in one shot.

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OpenRefine March 2021 Review

With spring at our doors, we have a new section on our monthly update: Academic Publication. Here we will list recent academic publications about OpenRefine, or papers that use OpenRefine in their process. This should be a trove of more advanced use cases promoting reproducible science. 

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OpenRefine February 2021 Review

Here is a summary of all the interesting tutorials and videos published about OpenRefine through February. 

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OpenRefine January 2021 Review

2021 starts big with the release of the new user documentation for OpenRefine. It took over six months of hard work to migrate the documentation from GitHub wiki to Docusaurus. It was also the opportunity to update the content. 

We also listed below new tutorials and videos published about OpenRefine through January along with the update of the NER and RDF extensions. 

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OpenRefine: Create an empty column

 Sometimes you just need to add a new empty column to your OpenRefine project. The process is straight forward as we show in this video tutorial.

• From any existing column select the option Edit column and then Add a column based on this column ... 
• By default, the GREL formula repeat the value from the column you selected
• Just replace the value with two quotes like this ""  to create an empty string. You can add any text between the quotes. OpenRefine will add it for all the rows selected by your facet.
• Give your new column and name and click OK
• and you are done! 

We made a quick video tutorial to show you the steps: 

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