In this opening chapter, we will discover what OpenRefine is made for, why you should use it, and how. After a short introduction, we will go through seven fundamental recipes that will give you a foretaste of the power of OpenRefine:

Although every recipe can be read independently from the others, we recommend that readers who are new to OpenRefine stick to the original order, at least for the first few recipes, since they provide crucial information about its general workings. More advanced users who already have an OpenRefine installation running can pick our tricks in any order they like.