(R) Bar Plots

In today's entry, I will briefly explain how to create basic bar plots. In future entries, the subject matter which I will cover, will pertain to formula based analysis. To re-iterate, if given the option, I would recommend creating most graphical representations through the utilization of non R related software.

The example data that we will be utilizing to create our example graphics is below:

Test1 <- c("Yes", "Yes", "Yes", "No", "No", "Yes", "No", "Yes", "No", "Yes", "Yes", "Yes", "No")

Test2 <- c("No", "No", "No", "Yes", "Yes", "Yes", "No", "No", "Yes", "Yes", "Yes", "No", "Yes")

CSVColors <- data.frame(Test1, Test2)

In the case of our first example, we will graph the first column, "Test1".

Test1 <- table(CSVColors$Test1)

In R, you have the option of selecting specific colors from which to color your bar plot. R recognizes most color names, to set up a color scheme for your graph, you may utilize the following code:

graphcol <- c("<color1>", "<color2>", "<color3>", etc.)

"graphcol" is the name of the vector that I selected for our example bar plot. However, if you'd prefer, you could use a different vector name of your choosing. As long as the "col=" option equals the name of the vector which contains the color selections, the colors should be properly applied to the graph.*

In our example, we will use the colors "Grey" and "Maroon".

graphcol <- c("grey", "maroon")

Now let's specify, within our code, that we would like these colors to be utilized:

barplot(Test1,
main="Vert Bar Plot Example", xlab="X-Axis",
ylab="Y-Axis", col=graphcol)

This should create the output:

If we would instead like to create a horizontal bar plot, the code would be modified to:

barplot(Test1,
main="Horiz Bar Plot Example", xlab="X-Axis",
ylab="Y-Axis", col=graphcol, horiz=TRUE)

The output that the above code creates is:

There are other options that can be selected to further customize the bar plot graphs. However, in this article, my goal was to simply present the basics. Again, if given the option, I would heavily suggest using a different program to graph results.