My attention was drawn to the City of York Council who publish their payments to suppliers for 2012 as ' Open Data' as a collection of comma separated files ( CSVs ) which you can then import into, god forbid Excel or Google Spreadsheets. That's very nice except, the CSV files are split into ten files. They are presumably month files ( I wonder where the other ones are?). Also, I found that the columns weren't regular - meaning that in some files, the Amount was in column 7, and column 8 in others. There is also a lot of repetitive data in the spreadsheets, making them quite big to work with. All of this makes it difficult to browse and combine the data. It's almost as if they really don't want you to read and understand it. So I thought I'd share how I coaxed it into something more useful in terms of understanding the data. The City of York Council are of course free to do something like this if they like, it only takes a few minutes - or they could pa
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