Unlike spreadsheets, most operations in OpenRefine are done on all visible rows, for example, the transformation of all cells in all rows under one column,[4] or the creation of a new column based on existing data.

Import is supported from following formats:[14] If input data is in a non-standard text format, it can be imported as whole lines, without splitting into columns, and then columns extracted later with OpenRefine's tools.

OpenRefine started life as Freebase Gridworks, developed by Metaweb and has been available as open source since January 2010.

[17] On 16 July 2010, Google acquired Metaweb,[18] the creators of Freebase, and on 10 November 2010 renamed Freebase Gridwords Google Refine, releasing version 2.0.

[20][21][22] Since then, the codebase has been in transition to an open source project named OpenRefine.