# plotGrouper

### 2026-04-28

# Description

A tool for generating figure-ready graphs from file. It borrows heavily from packages developed by others, including ggplot2 and dplyr from the tidyverse and batch statistical calculations from ggpubr.

Plots can be made using combinations of geoms including bar, violin, box, crossbar, density, point, line, and errorbar.

# Prerequisites

1. If you do not already have R installed, or your version is out of date, download the latest version Here.

- Optionally, install the latest version of RStudio Desktop.

2. Download the package from Bioconductor.

    if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
      install.packages("BiocManager")
      BiocManager::install("plotGrouper")

- Alternatively, install the development version of the package from Github using `BbiocManager`:

    BiocManager::install("jdgagnon/plotGrouper")

- Or using `devtools`:

    devtools::install_github("jdgagnon/plotGrouper")

# Usage

Load the package into the R session.

`library(plotGrouper)`

To initialize the shiny app, paste the following code in your R console and run it.

`plotGrouper()`

Once the web app opens, you can access the `iris` dataset by clicking the iris button to learn how to use the app. After the `iris` data loads, the selection windows will be automatically populated and a graph should be displayed.
The `Raw Data` tab displays the structure of the data loaded. Your file should be organized in the following way:

Unique identifier | Comparisons | Variables
--- | --- | ---
Sample | Species | Sepal.Length
setosa_1 | setosa | 5.1
setosa_2 | setosa | 4.9
versicolor_1 | versicolor | 7
versicolor_2 | versicolor | 6.4
virginica_1 | virginica | 6.3
virginica_2 | virginica | 5.8
etc… | etc… | etc…

These columns can be titled anything you want but values in the columns are important.

- The `Unique identifier` column should contain only unique values that identify each individual sample (e.g., `Sample` within `iris` `Raw Data`).

- The `Comparisons` column should contain replicated values that identify each individual as belonging to a group (e.g., `Species` within `iris` `Raw Data`).

- The `Variables` column(s) should created for each variable you wish to plot. The values in these columns must be numeric (e.g., `Sepal.Length`, `Sepal.Width`, `Petal.Length`, `Petal.Width` within `iris` `Raw Data`)

After importing a data file, a `Sheet` column will be created and populated with the sheet name(s) from the file if it came from an excel spreadsheet or the file name if it came from a csv or tsv file.

- The `Variables to plot` selection window is used to choose which variable(s) to plot (e.g., `Sepal.Width` from the `iris` data). If multiple are selected, they will be grouped according to the `Independent variable` selected.

- The `Comparisons` selection window is used to choose which column contains theinformation that identifies which condition each sample belongs to (e.g., the `Species` column within the `iris` data).

- The `Independent variable` selection window is used to select how the plots should be grouped. If `variable` is selected (the default), the plots will be grouped by the values in `Variables to plot`.

- Use the `Shapes` selector to change the shape of the points for each comparison variable.

- Use the `Colors` selector to change the point colors for each comparison variable.

- Use the `Fills` selector to change the fill color for the other geoms being plotted for each comparison variable.

To prevent the `Shapes`, `Colors`, or `Fills` from reverting to their defaults, click the `Lock` checkboxes.

Individual plots can be saved by clicking `Save` on the `Plot` tab or multiple plots may be arranged on a single page by clicking `Add plot to report`. Clicking this button will send the current plot to the `Report` tab and assign it a number in the `Report plot #` dropdown menu. To revisit a plot stored in the `Report` tab, select the plot you wish to restore and click `Load plot from report`. Changes can be made to this plot and then updated in the `Report` by clicking `Update plot in report`.

- The statistics calculated for the current plot being displayed in the `Plot` tab are stored in the `Statistics` tab. These can be saved by clicking the `Download` button on the `Statistics` tab.

- The `Plot Data` tab contains the reorganized subset of data being plotted.

- The `Raw Data` tab displays the dataframe that was created upon import of the file along with the automatically created `Sheet` column.

# Session info

Here is the output of `sessionInfo()` on the system on which this package was developed:

    sessionInfo()

    ## R version 4.6.0 RC (2026-04-17 r89917)
    ## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
    ## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
    ##
    ## Matrix products: default
    ## BLAS:   /home/biocbuild/bbs-3.23-bioc/R/lib/libRblas.so
    ## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lapack/liblapack.so.3.12.0  LAPACK version 3.12.0
    ##
    ## locale:
    ##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
    ##  [3] LC_TIME=en_GB              LC_COLLATE=C
    ##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
    ##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
    ##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
    ## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
    ##
    ## time zone: America/New_York
    ## tzcode source: system (glibc)
    ##
    ## attached base packages:
    ## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
    ##
    ## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
    ##  [1] compiler_4.6.0  fastmap_1.2.0   cli_3.6.6       htmltools_0.5.9
    ##  [5] tools_4.6.0     otel_0.2.0      knitr_1.51      digest_0.6.39
    ##  [9] xfun_0.57       mime_0.13       rlang_1.2.0     evaluate_1.0.5

# License

GNU GPL-3.0-or-later