Where to start?

• How to install and run (upgrading instructions)
• How to use

Love it so much?

• Join in with the development or help spread the meme about Google Refine.
• Get the development version so you can play with all the latest and greatest features, but if you are not afraid of bugs.

Feature Areas

Essential: These are the features you'd use 80% of the time when you use Refine. They help you clean up your data, extend it, and export it out for other tools to consume.

• Importing
• Filtering / faceting
• Editing:
• Editing cells, editing cells by Clustering
• Editing columns, creating columns by Extending data
• Editing rows
• Understanding expressions
• Understanding regular expressions
• Exporting
• History (undo/redo)

Reconciliation: You can use the "reconciliation" support in Refine to link text names in your data to database identifiers (also known as database keys, IDs). By connecting your data with other databases, you get more value out of your data.

• Reconciliation
• Data sources
• Extending Data - Calling Web Services
• Extending Data - Using Freebase

Uploading to Freebase: If you reconcile against Freebase, you can then align your data with Freebase's schemas using Schema Alignment dialogs and load your data into Freebase. For more information on Freebase data loading, see the Refinery project.

• Schema Alignment

Extensions: Add even more features to Refine by installing extensions.

• Installing Extensions
• Extensions that we know about

Recipes

For complicated tasks that are commonly done, just follow recipes that other folks have discovered and written up. A recipe is just a sequence of steps, and tips and tricks.

There are Quick Recipes (like removing duplicate row values, etc.)

and there are full recipes:

• Geocoding - translating street addresses to lat/lng coordinates
• Fetching URLs From Web Services - grabbing from the Web more data related to the data you already have
• Web Scraping & Extracting items from HTML pages
• Analyzing Apache Logs

Reference

Expressions

• Variables
• Google Refine Expression Language (GREL)
• Controls
• Functions
• Boolean functions
• String functions
• Array functions
• Math functions
• Date functions
• Other functions
• Jython

External Sites

While there's a lot of information in this wiki, there's plenty more online too. Here are some notable sites,

• Tony Hirst's blog
• Martin Magdinier's blog
• Yours? Let us know!

And of course searching online.