bulkreadr: Fast, Reproducible Bulk Data Import for R-Based Research Workflows

Background & Motivation

🗂️

Fragmented Files

Large projects arrive as dozens of spreadsheets, CSVs, and labelled survey extracts — no single tidy file.

⏱️

Slow & Manual

Analysts spend 40+ minutes on repetitive import clicks — time that should go to modelling and insights.

🔌

No Unified API

Individual tools exist inside the tidyverse, but no single interface loads heterogeneous files in one step.

Introducing bulkreadr Package

A single, vectorised API wrapping readxl, readr, googlesheets4, and haven — making bulk data import fast and reproducible.

📊

Excel & Google Sheets Every sheet in one call

📄

CSV Directories Ingest entire folders in one line

🏷️

SPSS & Stata Labels Preserve variable labels via haven

📋

Data Dictionaries Auto-generate with generate_dictionary()

⚡

QC Summaries inspect_na() & fill_missing_values()

# ── Spreadsheets ─────────────────────────
read_excel_workbook(path)
read_excel_files_from_dir(dir_path)
read_gsheets(sheet_id)

# ── Flat files ───────────────────────────
read_csv_files_from_dir(dir_path)

# ── Labelled survey data ──────────────────
read_spss_data(path)
read_stata_data(path)

# ── Quality control ───────────────────────
generate_dictionary(data)
fill_missing_values(data)
inspect_na(data)

Function Architecture

📊 Spreadsheets

read_excel_workbook() read_excel_files_from_dir() read_gsheets()

📄 Flat Files

read_csv_files_from_dir()

🏷️ Labelled

read_spss_data() read_stata_data() generate_dictionary() look_for()

⚙️ Other Utilities pull_out() convert_to_date() fill_missing_values() inspect_na()

Real-World Application

🌍

19 Northern Nigerian States

Multi-wave survey harmonisation across administrative units

Poverty Research Project

✅ Dictionary generator accelerated questionnaire harmonisation across survey rounds

✅ Coding errors that previously surfaced only at analysis stage were eliminated

Installation

bulkreadr is open-source and ready for your research

CRAN

install.packages("bulkreadr")

Github

devtools::install_github("gbganalyst/bulkreadr")

How to contribute

How to contribute?

You can contribute to the development of this package by:

star/clone the package repository via https://github.com/gbganalyst/bulkreadr

filing an issue if you detect a bug https://github.com/gbganalyst/bulkreadr/issues