Tips and Tricks
How to Order Bars and Lines in ggplot
October 18, 2023
With visualizations, it’s always better if there is some visual order in your charts. For example, take a look at these two bar charts. Which one do you find easier to read? And which chart gives you a better overview over the data? If you are like most people, then chances are that you will find that the sorted bar chart is easier to read. This simple action of sorting the bars can give a lot of structure to your data visualization. In turn, your chart is easier to understand for your...
How to add annotations in ggplot: should you use geoms or annotations?
October 11, 2023
Annotations are a neat way to draw your readers attention to specific parts of your data visualization. For example, you could use, say, an arrow to point to a specific data point, a rectangle to draw a border around specific points in a scatter plot that you want to highlight or a text label to clarify something. The possibilities for annotations are endless. Here’s a plot that combines these ideas into a ggplot. You can create such annotations with the annotate() layer. Who would have...
How to Create Your Own Table Theme with the gt Package
August 9, 2023
In our consulting work at R for the Rest of Us, we create tables all the time. We don’t just make plain tables, we make tables that look good and communicate well. This is important because: A clean design is more convincing A powerful design stands out so that people actually look at our tables We can use colors to reflect our clients’ branding We recently helped the Oregon Voices project to create customized data reports for every county in Oregon. Among other things, this required creating...
How to Use GitHub Actions with R to Run Code Automatically
May 26, 2023
In my course, Using Git and GitHub with R, I talk about GitHub Actions as one of the best reasons to use GitHub. GitHub Actions is a way for you to run code automatically, without you having to touch your computer. Maybe you run a survey and you want to pull the data every day. Or perhaps you want to generate a weekly report. Instead of manually running code in RStudio, you can use GitHub Actions to run this code automatically. Below, I will demonstrate two GitHub Actions: one that imports...
How to make your own color palettes in ggplot
January 23, 2023
One of the great things about creating data viz with ggplot is that you can create color palettes that match your or your clients' branding. We've written about how we do this in our consulting work. But the way we work is fairly complicated and I was asked recently for a simpler solution to making custom ggplot color palettes. I recorded a video to show how to make three different types of palettes Qualitative (i.e. categorical) Sequential (going from a low to a high value) Diverging (going...
How to Make 250+ Plots at the Same Time with R
January 9, 2023
For the past several years, I've worked on a report called Oregon by the Numbers. In this project, I use R to make every single plot in the report: over 250 plots each year. In the time I've worked on this project, I've become more and more efficient at making these plots. My efficiency comes thanks to the walk() function from the purrr package. This function can be confusing, but if you learn how to use it, you too can make hundreds of plots in just a few lines of code. As you'll see in the...
Using ChatGPT to Create Data Visualization with ggplot
December 5, 2022
Have you heard about ChatGPT? It's the latest in a line of AI tools that may transform how we write and how we code. ChatGPT takes a question and returns an answer. And it does so in a very human-sounding way. You know Siri? It's kind of like that, but actually good. To test it out, I signed up on the ChatGPT website and entered this prompt: Create a plot using ggplot2 and the palmerpenguins package. What I got back was very impressive. The response, copied verbatim below, shows exactly how...
No Designer Needed: How to Create Beautiful Reports Using Only R
November 21, 2022
I recently gave a talk titled No Designer Needed: How to Create Beautiful Reports Using Only R at the CANSSI Ontario Statistical Software Conference. This talk showed how we at R for the Rest of Us use the pagedownpackage to make high-quality PDF reports for our clients. In the talk, I explained the two approaches people typically take when making PDFs: Some people make all charts and tables, and then bring in a designer to lay out the report. The problem with this is that it is inefficient....
Why You Should Always Use RStudio Projects
October 17, 2022
One of the most important tips we teach participants in R in 3 Months is to always use RStudio projects. There are a lot of resources out there that explain why this is useful (see, especially, Jenny Bryan's article Project-Oriented Workflow). But many of these resources go a bit over the head of newcomers. So, I asked Charlie Hadley to record a video explaining why using RStudio projects is so important. In her video below, you'll see a clear, concise, and simple explanation for the value of...