ExcelToShiny

A system for creating Shiny dashboards using Excel spreadsheets.

Installation

You can install the development version of ExcelToShiny from GitHub with:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("IDEMSInternational/ExcelToShiny")

Overview

ExcelToShiny enables users to define Shiny dashboards using Excel spreadsheets. This approach makes it easy to specify dashboard components, including:

• Main Page: Global dashboard settings.
• Contents Page: Defines the structure of the Shiny app.
• Display Pages: Creates different visualization components.
• Tabbed Pages: Organises pages into tabbed layouts.
• Download Pages: Allows data downloads with optional access control.

Example Usage

Below is an example of how to load an Excel file and use it to generate a Shiny dashboard:

# Load libraries
library(ExcelToShiny)
library(dplyr)
library(rio)
library(NHANES)

# Load your data you want to run
data(NHANES)

# Run manipulations. Here's an example of where we use a second data frame in our Shiny Excel
NHANES_by_ind <- NHANES %>%
  dplyr::group_by(ID) %>%
  dplyr::mutate(count = 1:n()) %>%
  dplyr::filter(count == 1) %>%
  dplyr::ungroup()

# Set the key variable to be the same type
NHANES$ID <- as.character(NHANES$ID)
NHANES_by_ind$ID <- as.character(NHANES_by_ind$ID)

# Run any credentials data for downloading page
credentials_data <- data.frame(
  user = "admin",
  password = "password",
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

# Call in the test data
path <- system.file("extdata", "example_data.xlsx", package = "ExcelToShiny")
all_sheets <- rio::import_list(path)

# Your shiny app
build_shiny(
  title = "Test Dashboard",
  data_list = all_sheets,
  data_frame = NHANES,
  key_var = "ID"
)

Contributing, Reporting Issues, and Seeking Support

We welcome contributions from the community to enhance the ExcelToShiny package. If you would like to contribute, please follow these guidelines:

• Contribute to the software: If you wish to contribute new features, fix bugs, or improve the documentation, please fork the repository, create a new branch for your changes, and submit a pull request. Ensure that your code follows the existing style and include tests where applicable.

• Report issues or problems: If you encounter a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue in the GitHub Issues section. Provide as much detail as possible, including steps to reproduce the issue if applicable.

• Seek support: For any questions or help with using ExcelToShiny, you can reach out by opening a discussion in the GitHub Discussions, or open a new issue with a “Question” label. We aim to respond within a week.

We appreciate your contributions and feedback!