Comment on ggplot2 is love. ggplot2 is life.

snek_boi@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• bjorney@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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

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  • snek_boi@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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

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• scrion@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • snek_boi@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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