What Workbench can do for data

We are building Workbench to be a simpler, more powerful way to work with data, especially for journalists. Data journalism involves steps such as getting the data, cleaning it, and visualizing it. It also requires many other tasks that might be less obvious, like checking for updated data, scraping tables out of web pages, and sending a completed story to your editor for review.

A data tool that you can’t get data into isn’t much good, which is why Workbench has a variety of Add Data modules.

Every Add Data module has an “update button” that checks for new data. Or, you can make Workbench check for you automatically.

Previously loaded data is automatically versioned and saved, so you can go back to it later — for example if the data you were using was deleted! And when Workbench finds that the data has changed, it can notify you by email.

Custom modules can even produce custom visualizations! Think of Workbench as a package manager for user-friendly data processing tools.

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