Last month, we visited the news:rewired conference and gained some valuable insights into how news and journalism is developing. One of sessions, hosted by Leila Haddou from the Sunday Times shared a list of the great tools out there for the media industry and amongst them we found some goodies. Our favourite and henceforth our Tool of the Month has got to be OpenRefine.

One of the most tedious jobs in the creative industry has got to be data crunching tasks, especially when the data you’re working with is all over the place. Small errors like extra spaces, misspellings and varying abbreviations often go unnoticed in large datasets and you may be missing out on vital stats.

With OpenRefine, the tool can pick up these inconsistencies in the file, so you have a fully reliable dataset ready to crunch. OpenRefine can also transform the format of the data. So, if you were looking at a set of data in a list and you wanted it in table, OpenRefine can do that for you too. Data cleansing has never been so easy!