How to Download Data

DLUHC Open Data offers a variety of ways to download and share data. This guide describes how to download data:

  • Download an entire dataset
  • Download data from a spreadsheet view
  • Download the contents of a data cart

This guide does not explore accessing data via APIs (application programming interfaces). For more information about machine readable data see the API guides. 

Most of the data in DLUHC Open Data is available as a CSV download

Download an entire Dataset

Once you've found the dataset you're interested in, the dataset page has a link at the bottom of the page which will allow you to download the entire dataset. This will include all available areas, all time periods, and all other dimensions and could result in a very large file, particularly if the dataset has a large number of dimensions.

You can download the entire dataset in:

CSV format: A comma separated values file, with one row per observation, and each dimension in a separate column. Also known as the Tidy data format.

N-triples format: This is for technical users and software developers. N-triples is a serialisation of RDF and allows anyone to load the dataset into another RDF database (also known as a triple-store or graph database).

Download data from a spreadsheet view

Once we’ve got to your chosen spreadsheet view of the data, you should see something like this.


Below the data table, and the list of relevant dimensions and reference areas, there is a download section:


Here, we can choose to download the exact slice of data that we have in the data table above, in CSV format. CSV files can be opened in many applications, such as Excel, LibreOffice, or Google Spreadsheets.

To download this slice of data, we need to click on the CSV button next to ‘This slice, as a spreadsheet’. The downloaded file will be laid out with the same columns as the web page view.

The format of the Slice CSV files is similar to the spreadsheet view, with areas as rows, and the remaining unlocked dimension as the columns.

Downloading the contents of a Data Cart

Once you've made and saved a data cart, you can download its contents as CSV. 

The format of the data cart CSV is similar to the spreadsheet view, with areas as rows, and dimension values as columns.

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