Until now, data on Many Eyes was “frozen,” without any possibility of change. If you wanted to correct a mistake or add new data points, you had to upload a new, separate data set to the site and re-create all your visualizations.

Not anymore! Now you can edit any tabular data set you upload to Many Eyes, using a data editor created by intern Eric Gilbert. Any visualizations based on that data will use the most recent version of your data - ensuring that any changes are automatically reflected.

To edit a data set you’ve uploaded, go to the data set’s page and click on the “edit data set” button. There’s a variety of operations you can perform in edit mode, ranging from basic cell edits to more complicated transformations such as deleting entire rows and columns and applying functions to numeric columns.

Here’s an overview of the editing capabilities now available on the site:
- Change a cell value
- Add and delete rows and columns
- Change the sort order of the rows
- Look for possible problems by highlighting outliers and missing values
- Apply functions (like a logarithm) to a column, or divide one column by another

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For now you can only edit tabular data sets; free text data editing is not currently supported. And you can only edit your own data sets, though this may change in the future. Read our editing guide for a full description. And happy editing!