Meet the Open Data Editor (ODE) – a free, open-source tool designed to help nonprofits, data journalists, activists, and public servants detect errors in their datasets. It is designed for people working with tabular data (Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) who don't know how to code or don't have the programming skills to automatise the data exploration process, and therefore spend much more time than they would like checking their datasets for possible errors and correcting them, before they are finally ready to move to the part of work which is actually interesting for them.
Simple, lightweight, privacy-friendly, and built for real-world challenges like offline work and low-resource settings, ODE is part of Open Knowledge’s initiative The Tech We Want — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used.
And there's more! ODE comes with a free online course that can help you make your datasets better, therefore making your life/work easier.
The Open Data Editor isn’t another complex data tool – it's your shortcut to better data and improved data literacy.
Here are a few tasks that ODE can help you with:
Here is how organisations across the world are using ODE:
Have you always been wondering how you can produce better data without having to become a data scientist?
Developed in partnership with Open Knowledge Brazil and Escola de Dados, Quality and consistent data with the Open Data Editor is an essential open educational resource for anyone who wants to generate knowledge from data. This course is free and fun. You'll learn a lot of very useful tips and tricks which will help you make your everyday work more efficient and be proud of your datasets today.
The ODE app + ODE course combo is definitely your gateway to the world of data.
This course is specially designed for:
🔹 People who don't know how to code or don't have programming skills to automatise their work with data
🔹 Journalists, researchers, and civil society workers looking to handle data more effectively
🔹 Anyone interested in improving data consistency and reliability
Here's what you'll learn:
Learn to work with tabular data
Don’t get lost when reviewing your spreadsheet
Clean up your spreadsheets to gain valuable insights
Understand how to guarantee the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets
Master all about metadata
Understand the Open Definition and the main data principles
Follow in the footsteps of an exclusive instructor
Get hands-on and learn from your mistakes and successes
Learn how to produce/work with better databases without writing code
The course is now available in English and Portuguese. It will soon be translated into Spanish, and French. If you would like to contribute to the translation into other languages, please contact us at info@okfn.org.
We are not developing the Open Data Editor alone. We are in constant dialogue with user-organisations around the world who help us make the application better and more useful every day.
Pilot Programme (2025)
ODE isn’t just a tool – it’s a collaboration.
At the beginning of 2025, we invited organisations from any geography and any area of expertise to express interest in participating in a four-month funded pilot programme. The task is to learn how to integrate Open Data Editor into their work and improve the tool itself while doing so. The main requirement for eligibility was to have a non-technical team or group of collaborators who work with data without coding-skills.
Here’s how the five pilot organisations of the first cohort are using ODE:
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Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya Initiative (BHKi) is working with genomic data and metadata“We will explore the use of ODE to curate and harmonise genomic data and metadata, and community data. Additionally, we will gather information on bioinformatics/computational biology learners, who collect and use this data, and their experiences with the data. Our goal is to track their needs and interests across East Africa, to better inform outreach activities.”
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City of Zagreb is tackling the challenges of working with infrastructure data“ODE will be used for bridging interoperability challenges within our existing (open) data infrastructure, ensuring frictionless data exchange between various data platforms, data sources and data formats. We will use ODE to standardise open data processes and data management procedures by improving data transformation and data validation processes and publishing of open data on multiple data platforms."
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The Demography Project is focusing on water, air quality and electoral data“ODE is a welcome opportunity for enhanced data quality of our environmental monitoring projects as well as our electoral/parliamentary monitoring project. We intend to deploy ODE to analyse large open government and citizen-generated datasets on atmospheric (air quality) and freshwater resources for enhanced personal and collective responsibility over rapidly degrading natural resources in Kenya.”
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Observatoire des armements / CDRPC is working with defence spending data“Our monitoring network aims to involve as many people as possible in defense and security issues, a taboo subject in France. For this reason, it’s essential to offer an easy tool for finding errors in databases and improving data quality.”
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Open Knowledge Nepal is working together with local governments and their infrastructure data“ODE will empower non-technical staff to identify, clean, and validate data without requiring coding skills. By allowing municipal staff to handle data errors directly, it will reduce the burden on technical teams and improve data efficiency. The current manual data cleaning process is time-consuming, and introducing a no-code tool like ODE will simplify and streamline workflows, saving time and resources while ensuring high-quality datasets.”
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A new call for proposals for the second cohort is planned for May. Stay tuned!
Piloting ODE with Newsrooms and NGOs (2024)
In 2024, before the first stable release of the application, we tested the application over two months with two organisations, who integrated the app in their daily work and provided us with extremely useful feedback that informed the product development.
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StoryData worked with data journalism and public information“Moving through the table’s cumbersome and in a dataset with thousands of rows and many columns it’s difficult to locate the error detected by the application. The ‘Errors Report’ could be used as a means to directly access the cell with the error that has been detected.”
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ACIJ worked with government data, such as budget allocations, and judicial employee statistics“Exploring data in ODE was generally intuitive, with features like column sorting providing utility. However, data exploration could be further enhanced by addressing pagination issues and improving metadata recognition."
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User Testing (2024)
At the end of 2024, we invited several organisations to take part in Open Data Editor testing sessions and documentation reviews. This call was open to data practitioners in general based anywhere – both advanced users working on complex research and beginners looking for solutions to handle data more easily. Participants were selected with a view to diversity in terms of geography, gender, and areas of expertise.
Some of the feedback has already been incorporated into the latest version of the application.
You can also make an impact with the Open Data Editor. Contact our team to tell us how ODE is helping you find errors in your spreadsheets and improve your overall work with data. The more people share, the more we make a difference.
We’re building ODE in the open.
Follow our progress, from feature updates to community stories:
Part of our goal in developing the Open Data Editor (ODE) this year is to increase digital literacy among key communities. We’re thrilled to introduce our latest learning resource: a free, hands-on course designed to help non-technical users improve their data skills.
This post discusses our approach to integrating AI into the Open Data Editor. To ensure thoughtful AI integration, we are emphasising the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, user feedback, and ethical considerations rather than just technical implementation.
ODE in action: A new cohort of pilot organisations will start integrating the application in their work in March on issues as varied as environmental justice, health, peace, and public sector data.
In celebration of Open Data Day 2025, experts from Europe and beyond share their insights, approaches, and best practices for ensuring high-quality open data.
OKFN has been selected as a grantee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation for the second year in a row to continue working on improving the Open Data Editor (ODE).
How can AI help non-technical users validate and improve the quality of their data in the Open Data Editor, taking into account transparency, privacy, and functionality?
Here is a short text explaining how we tested the Open Data Editor before its official stable release and what we learned from the process.
We are happy to announce the release of Open Data Editor (ODE) 1.2.0, now a stable open source desktop application that makes working with data easier for people with little to no technical skills.
All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
Learn more about its funding programmes here.
ODE is free, open-source, and built for public good. Join hundreds of users who trust it for their data work.
If you have any questions or want any additional information about the Open Data Editor, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.
You can also have direct contact with the team members:
romina.colman@okfn.org
sara.petti@okfn.org
patricio.delboca@okfn.org
lucas.pretti@okfn.org
A big thank you and recognition for the fundamental work of the following people in bringing the Open Data Editor to its current form:
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