Manually Ordering Factors

Manually Ordering Factors

Situation: Sometimes you have want to display bar charts in a specific order, but the numbers get re-arranged or group_by and sort orders by value, but you have a specific order in mind.

Context: In this example, I have “Proposals” numbered “1-10”. I want to display them in order, but number 10 doesn’t go after 9, but instead goes 1, 10, 2, 3, and so on…I need to manually set the factor order so the bar chart displays exactly how I’d like.

I used fct_relevel (factor re-level), choose a specific column, and the second parameter is a vector of values with the factors manually arranged according to how I’d like. Then I set it to that specific column so R knows the desired factor level.

# manually arranging factors - num
# note: move "proposal 10" to the end
# them apply newly arranged factor levels to column of interest
new$num <- fct_relevel(new$num, c("proposal 1", "proposal 2", "proposal 3", "proposal 4", "proposal 5", 
                       "proposal 6", "proposal 7", "proposal 8", "proposal 9", "proposal 10"))

I can also achieve this for string values that don’t have an obvious order. Here i’m ordering the proposals by a known sequence (but not obvious to the audience).

# manually arrange factors - name
# then apply newly arranged factor levels to column of interest
new$name <- fct_relevel(new$name, c("Approve the Bankless DAO Genesis Proposal",
                        "What charity should CMS Holdings donate 100k towards",
                        "Badge Distribution for Second Airdrop",
                        "Reward Season 0 Active Members",
                        "Bankless DAO Season 1",
                        "BanklessDAO Season 1 Grants Committee Ratification",
                        "BED Index Logo Contest",
                        "Request for funds for Notion's ongoing subscription",
                        "Transfer ownership of the treasury multisig wallet from the genesis team to the DAO",
                        "Bankless DAO Season 2"))

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