Step 2: Creating a new Project

Open Refine (previously Google Refine) is a data cleaning software that uses your web browser as an interface. This means it will look like it runs on the internet but all your data remains on your machine and you do not need an internet connection to work with it.

The main aim of Refine is to help you exploring and cleaning your data before you use it further. It is built for large datasets – so, as long as your spreadsheets can hold the information, Refine can too.

To work with your data in Refine you need to start a new project:

1. Start Refine – this will open a browser window pointing to http://127.0.0.1:3333 – if this doesn’t happen open the link with your browser directly
2. Create a new project: On the left tab select the “Create Project” tab:

1. Click on “Choose Files” to choose the downloaded file of Asian Development Bank activities in Bangladesh, and click on “next” – you can also use the URL to the CSV directly if your data is hosted on the web.
2. You will get a preview on how Refine will interpret your data -as we have selected a well formatted CSV, this should be pretty automatic, and the ‘Columns separated by comma (CSV) option should be selected at the bottom of the page.
3. Review the preview carefully to make sure the data looks right. Double check character encoding, to see if there are any funny characters that show up.
4. You may want to turn off “guess data types”, particularly if you have data that contains leading zeros in numbers or identifiers which are significant.
5. Name your project in the box on the top right side and click on “Create Project”

1. The project will open in the ‘project view’; this is the basic interface you are going to work with. By default refine shows only 10 rows of data, but you can change this on the bar above the data rows. Also, you can use the navigation on the right to see the next or previous rows.

You now have successfully created your first refine project! Remember: although it runs in a web-browser, the Refine server is still on your machine – all the data is there.