This spreadsheet sent in response to an FOI request appeared to have been converted from PDF format

In a guest post post for OJB, Ion Mates explains how he used OpenRefine to clean up a spreadsheet which had been converted from PDF format. An earlier version of this post was published on his blog.

Journalists rarely get their hands on nice, tidy data: public bodies don’t have an interest in providing information in a structured form. So it is increasingly part of a journalist’s job to get that information into the right state before extracting patterns and stories.

A few months ago I sent a Freedom of Information request asking for the locations of all litter bins in Birmingham. But instead of sending a spreadsheet downloaded directly from their database, the spreadsheet they sent appeared to have been converted from a multiple-page PDF.

This meant all sorts of problems, from rows containing page numbers and repeated header rows, to information split across multiple rows and even pages.

In this post I’ll be taking you through I used the free data cleaning tool OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) to tackle all these problems and create a clean version of the data. Continue reading →