Ordering of bars in ggplot

Question

I have looked through the answers in this forum but cannot seem to find an answer to this specific problem. I have the following data and want to create a bar chart where the bars are ordered from largest to smallest in terms of "Value", rather than having them in alphabetical order:

breadth_data <- read.table(textConnection("Stakeholder  Value
'Grantseekers'  0.90
'Donors'    0.89
'Community' 0.55
'Hurricane Relief Fund' 0.24
'Media' 0.19
'Employment Seekers'    0.12
'Affiliates'    0.10
'Youth' 0.09
'Women' 0.02
'Former Board Members'  0.01"), header=TRUE)

Then the basic bar chart:

c <- ggplot(breadth_data, aes(x=Stakeholder, y=Value))
c + geom_bar(stat="identity") + coord_flip() + scale_y_continuous('') + scale_x_discrete('')

I have tried many of the different reorderings and transformations I've seen on StackOverflow but I cannot seem to find one that works. I am sure this is fairly simple, but I would appreciate any help!

Thanks,

Greg

score 71 · Accepted Answer · answered May 11 '11 at 16:41

71

You want function reorder():

breadth_data <- transform(breadth_data, 
                          Stakeholder = reorder(Stakeholder, Value))

Which gives:

reordered barplot

If you want them the other way round, an easy way is just to use order() on Value inside the reorder() call:

breadth_data <- transform(breadth_data,
                          Stakeholder = reorder(Stakeholder, 
                                                order(Value, decreasing = TRUE)))

answered May 11 '11 at 16:41

Gavin Simpson

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8

Or use `-Value` inside the call to `reorder` to reverse the direction. – Richie Cotton May 11 '11 at 16:56
@Richie - of course (slaps face!) - clearly not thinking straight this arvo! – Gavin Simpson May 11 '11 at 17:24
1

I also use 1/Value to re-order in the opposite direction. It worked! :-) – George D Girton Jun 06 '18 at 20:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 28 '22 at 14:22

Another option could be using the fct_reorder function from forcats package. Here is a reproducible example:

library(ggplot2)
library(forcats)
ggplot(breadth_data, aes(x=fct_reorder(Stakeholder, Value), y=Value)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity") + 
  coord_flip() + 
  scale_y_continuous('') + 
  scale_x_discrete('')

Use fct_rev for reversing order:

# Reverse order
ggplot(breadth_data, aes(x=fct_rev(fct_reorder(Stakeholder, Value)), y=Value)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity") + 
  coord_flip() + 
  scale_y_continuous('') + 
  scale_x_discrete('')

^{Created on 2022-10-28 with reprex v2.0.2}

Ordering of bars in ggplot

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