EasyMergeR: an interactive Shiny application to manipulate multiple XLSX files of multiple sheets

TL;DR

EasyMergeR is an interactive, user-friendly Shiny app designed to simplify the manipulation of multiple XLSX files with multiple sheets, addressing a common bottleneck in clinical data integration for researchers with limited programming skills.

Contribution

We developed EasyMergeR, a novel, code-free R Shiny application that facilitates interactive handling of complex XLSX clinical data files, improving accessibility for medical staff.

Findings

Enables easy manipulation of multi-sheet XLSX files

Reduces time and technical barriers in clinical data processing

Supports integration of sequencing and clinical data

Abstract

The integration of sequencing data with clinical information is a widely accepted strategy in bioinformatics and health informatics. Despite advanced databases and sophisticated tools for processing omics data, challenges remain in handling the raw clinical data (typically in XLSX format with multiple sheets inside), either exported from health information system (HIS) or manually collected by investigators. This is particularly difficult for time-constrained medical staff with little or no programming background, and it is typically the first bottleneck in many clinical-oriented studies. To fill this gap, we developed EasyMergeR, a simple, user-friendly, code-free R Shiny application that allows interactive manipulation of multiple XLSX files with multiple sheets and provides basic data manipulation capabilities based on the tidyverse and other handy R packages.