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Use the scales Package for Nicely Formatted Values

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Transcript

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Your Turn

  1. Make a new variable called percent_display that shows the percent_of_total_enrollment variable as a nicely formatted percent (rounded to the nearest whole number)

  2. Make sure you save this as highlight_district (i.e. don’t just display the result)

Learn More

The best place to learn more about the scales package is its documentation website. You’ll see that you can format a wide range of values using this package, including dollar values, dates, times, and more.

Dana Siedel gave a nice talk at rstudio::conf 2020 about the scales package that is well worth a 20-minute watch!

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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Juan Clavijo

Juan Clavijo

November 28, 2021

Hello,

I had already rounded my proportions and multiplied by 100 so I now have 39.4, for example. when running this I get 3940%. Is there a way to make it a 39.4% without undoing the previous rounding? Also, do I need to do this if I already have the 39.4 for graphing purposes?

David Keyes

Yup, take a look at the scale argument in the percent function. I don't use it much (see below for how I typically work), but I believe you can set the value to 100 to divide your value by 100 before converting it to a percent.

I normally keep any values that I know will be percents between 0 and 1. Then, I make a separate column for the formatted values. So, the numeric column would be called pct while the formatted column would be called pct_formatted. I use the pct for things like my y aesthetic property on my plots and the pct_formatted to add text labels. If I want to create y axis text that's formatted in percents, I use the percent_format(). I might add a line like:

scale_y_continuous(labels = percent_format()) and that will make all y axis text show up as percents. Hope that helps!

Matt M

When I run highlight_dataframe <- mutate(percent_display = percent('Percent of Total', accuracy = 1)) I get the error: Error in UseMethod("round_any") : no applicable method for 'round_any' applied to an object of class "character"

If i remove the ", accuracy = 1" I get the error: "Error in x * scale : non-numeric argument to binary operator"

but the 'Percent of Total' variable is numeric (when I mouseover, it says "numeric with range 0-1"

David Keyes

David Keyes

December 6, 2021

I think you're using the single quote here. As a result it's treating the text Percent of Total as text, not as a variable. Try using the ` (same key as tilde) instead and let me know if that works.

Mark Lewis

I work with a step like this pretty often, but always seem to run into some complication or other. I like the idea here of making a completely new column for the display value. I see that scales::percent() has been deprecated in favor of scales::label_percent(). But label_percent() says it's designed to be used in a labels argument in a ggplot scale. Do you have a sense of what the consequences are (if any) of using it outside that context, like in a simple mutate() of the sort you're doing here?

David Keyes

David Keyes

December 5, 2022

It's a really good question and one I was talking about with a collaborator recently. I read the percent() docs, which say, the function will be "kept for backward compatibility." Given this, I'm comfortable using it. I think the tidyverse team sees scales only being used in ggplot, whereas I often use it in other contexts as well. Given this, I don't plan to change my usage, but you may have different needs so may want to choose your own path. Hope that helps!

Mark Lewis

That makes sense, thanks!