Science Memes

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ggplot2 is love. ggplot2 is life. (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Honest question: do you think this could improve with practice? Or does the ggplot workflow necessarily makes it all slower?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It absolutely improves with practice, and once you have settled on an aesthetic you like you can simply reuse the code, e.g. store all your color/line properties in a variable and just update each figure with that variable

My thesis had something like 30 figures, and at multiple points I had to do things like "put these all on a log scale instead" or "whoops, data on row 143,827 looks like it was transcribed wrong, need to fix it"

While setting everything up in ggplot took a couple hours, making those changes to 30 figures in ggplot took seconds, whereas it would have taken a monumental amount of time to do manually in excel

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the reply! So Excel maybe is not as fast as the meme would suggest, I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Once you have figured it out, it's actually a nice workflow. Don't get me wrong, when I'm not publishing a paper, I quickly forget all commands, my whole setup etc. and start from scratch, cursing a lot and retracing my steps in the history, basically re-learning the framework. I'd still never move away from ggplot2.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I agree with you. I love ggplot2. And I'm good at it. So it's my software of choice when doing data analysis and when making graphs.

However, I understand that there's an upfront cost to pay to use it: learning to code, tidying data, etc..

And beyond that, I don't really do data analysis with spreadsheet software like Excel or LibreCalc. So I don't know if a proficient LibreCalc user would be able to compete with a proficient ggplot2 user.