Undo/Redo

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 5 min
Questions
  • How can we undo operations of our data

Objectives
  • Introduce the undo stack.

Using undo and redo.

It’s common while exploring and cleaning a dataset to discover after you’ve made a change that you really should have done something else first. OpenRefine provides Undo and Redo operations to make this easy.

OpenRefine goes beyond this though.

Every time you modify data, a new entry is added to an undo stack. The undo stack provides a full history of the changes to your data and lets you jump between different revisions.

Exercise

  1. Click where it says Undo / Redo on the left side of the screen. For a new project, you should only see one entry in the panel called 0. Create project.
  2. Hover over any the cell on row one in the Title column. The word edit will appear. Click on it.
  3. Edit this entry however you see fit.
  4. Now you will see a new entry in a stack: 1. Edit single cell on row 1, column Title.
  5. Repeat this process as often as you would like, and observe as new entries are added to the stack.
  6. Click on any of the steps in the Undo/Redo panel. Notice how your data reverts to the way it was at the time of that step.
  7. Notice that you can still click on the later steps to Redo the actions. Before moving on to the next lesson, undo all of the edits that you have made to the data so far.

Key Points

  • Undo and redo are useful ways to rewind operations we have done to our data