Your no-code app for error-free spreadsheets, and guaranteed privacy and FAIR data

Meet the Open Data Editor (ODE) by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), a desktop app that catches errors in your data automatically and shows you exactly what needs fixing. Whether you're preparing data for publication or cleaning datasets for analysis, Open Data Editor helps you get it right.

ODE is a free, open-source tool designed to help nonprofits, data journalists, activists, and public servants 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.

It enhances data literacy worldwide through a free, gamified course, Quality and Consistent Data with Open Data Editor, available on School of Data.

Since 2025, the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) has recognised Open Data Editor as a digital public good (DPG), which means it meets high standards of openness and supports sustainable development globally.

Download Open Data Editor now and turn messy data into something you can trust.

Here is how organisations across the world are using ODE:

The Quality and Consistent Data with the Open Data Editor course, available on School of Data, is an essential open educational resource for anyone who wants to generate knowledge from data. 

It is specially designed for non-technical users working with tabular data (Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) but without advanced technical knowledge. It's 100% online, free, and gamified.

Here's what you will learn:

How to work with tabular data

• Don’t get lost when reviewing your spreadsheet
• Clean up your spreadsheets to gain valuable insights

FAIR data principles

• 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

Learning-by-doing

• 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 at Escola de Dados. 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.

The Open Data Editor has focused our recent efforts on leading by example while we advocate for The Tech We Want with high-impact sectors and across the open movement. With ODE, we are demonstrating that technology can be done differently: in an open, long-lasting, resilient and affordable way, to solve people's problems.

The technical mission of ODE is to provide a free, open-source, no-code, cross-platform desktop application that empowers non-technical users with data-validation and metadata standards (notably the FAIR principles), and output clean, interoperable datasets ready for publication—while preserving privacy (local-first architecture), remaining lightweight (suitable for low-resource or offline contexts), and employing open standards (e.g., the Frictionless Data specifications) for maximum reuse and integration.

These achievements show us that we are on the right track:

• The project was formally recognised by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, underscoring its maturity, openness and global public-interest value.
• The introduction of AI-assisted data-quality features has significantly expanded the tool’s capabilities, enabling faster identification of anomalies, smarter suggestions for corrections, and improved handling of large, dense datasets while retaining a privacy-preserving, local-first design.
• The project has strengthened its learning ecosystem through the expansion of its multilingual educational resources, including a comprehensive online course and integrated in-app learning tools, which together support non-technical users in adopting better data-cleaning and metadata practices.

We’re building Open Data Editor in the open. Follow our progress, from feature updates to community stories:

Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor was made possible thanks to charitable grants from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

Learn more about its funding programmes here.

If you have any questions or want any additional information about the Open Data Editor, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.