Hey R, don’t sort my data!

We learn to override R’s intuitiveness when it is not helpful as it arranges the bars by itself.

This is something I stumble often while working with ggplot2. I will elaborate as we go about to construct plots for my blog activity.

Create data

mymonths<- c("Jan", # This is my months column for 2021
             "Feb",
             "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
             "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec")
bloggoal<- c(8,8,8,4,4,4,2,2,2,1,1,1) 
blogposts<- c(2,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) #These are the blog posts 
#i have created so far, to compare with my goals

bloggoal are my blog goals every month, note that I want 8 in first quarter and 2 in third quarter, I have already ordered them. blogposts are the one i have posted. I have not contributed 2 this month yet, as this is my first post for this year (and thus this month), but i wanted a whole number to depict comparison plots.

This is an old post, so might not concur with my current blog activity.

Now we have our variables ready, lets make them a dataframe.

myblogtrack<- data.frame(mymonths, 
                         bloggoal,
                         blogposts)
myblogtrack #displays dataframe

   mymonths bloggoal blogposts
1       Jan        8         2
2       Feb        8         0
3       Mar        8         0
4       Apr        4         0
5       May        4         0
6       Jun        4         0
7       Jul        2         0
8       Aug        2         0
9       Sep        2         0
10      Oct        1         0
11      Nov        1         0
12      Dec        1         0

I am displaying the whole data, if we have a larger data, we will use str(), glimpse(), head() from dplyr.

Let us plot

library(tidyverse) 
ggplot(myblogtrack, #data
       aes(x=mymonths, #aesthetics
           y=bloggoal))+
  geom_col() + # i just need a column to know my goal
  labs(x="Year 2021", # renaming axes
       y="Number of Blog Posts",
       title = "Sound Blog Goals")+
  theme_classic()

oops! This happens when ggplot wants to help us by sorting the x-axis alphabetically. It might be useful elsewhere, but not here. So we will tell ggplot that I have already sorted it in the order I want by informing at the data level.

But, how?

Do not sort

myblogtrack$mymonths<-factor(myblogtrack$mymonths,
                             levels = myblogtrack$mymonths) 

We achieve two things here:

• we say mymonths variable is a factor, and

• also fix that it is in the order (levels) of what they are and should be.

Now we use this dataset,and plot again.

Corrected plot

ggplot(myblogtrack,
       aes(x=mymonths,
           y=bloggoal))+
  geom_col()+
  labs(x="Year 2021", 
       y="Number of Blog Posts",
       title = "Sound Blog Goals")+
  theme_classic()

There you go! The barplots are in the order of months.

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