Background: High-throughput "omics" based data analysis play emerging roles in life sciences and molecular diagnostics. This emphasizes the urgent need for user-friendly windows-based software interfaces that could process the diversity of large tab-delimited raw data files generated by these methods. Depending on the study, dozens to hundreds of these data tables are generated. Before the actual statistical or cluster analysis, these data tables have to be combined and merged to expression matrices (e.g., in case of gene expression analysis). Gene annotations as well as information concerning the samples analyzed may be appended, renewed or extended. Often additional data values shall be computed or certain features must be filtered out.
Results: In order to perform these tasks, we have developed a Microsoft Windows based application, "TableButler", which allows biologists or clinicians without substantial bioinformatics background to perform a plethora of data processing tasks required to analyze the large-scale data.
Conclusion: TableButler is a monolithic Windows application. It is implemented to handle, join and preprocess large tab delimited ASCII data files. The intuitive user interface enables scientists (e.g. biologists, clinicians or others) to setup workflows for their specific problems by simple drag-and drop like operations. For more details about TableButler, visit http://www.OncoExpress.org/software/tablebutler.