How do I publish my data online?

If you’ve got some data for your investigation and want to publish it – either for others to see the raw material, or to invite them to help you explore it – there are a number of ways to do it. 

If your data is in Excel, for example, you can use a tool like Tableizer to copy and paste the data to convert it into a HTML table that you can then use in a blog post or webpage.

You can also upload your spreadsheet to Google Docs, and publish the spreadsheet from there. This has the advantage of making it easier for others to work with the data (which they can’t easily do with a HTML table).

Google Docs allows you to publish the data in a range of formats – and will provide HTML for you to embed the spreadsheet too (this page explains how). Another advantage of this approach is that if you update the spreadsheet, these embedded and published versions will update too.

Finally, you may want to consider uploading and publishing your data to a site like BuzzData, a place where data journalists, developers, and other people interested in data share their work. The site allows you to ‘follow’ particular datasets and users, and so is a good way to connect with people who share an interest in your field, and who might be able to help you interrogate the data that you have.

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