Reverse Plotting

Left to Right

Situation: The easiest way to flip bar chart arrangement on x-axis after you’ve “reorder” by the y-axis values is to put a “minus” in front of the y variable:

# note the minus in front of content_count
df %>%
   ggplot(aes(x = reorder(username, -content_count), 
              y = content_count, 
              fill = num_roles_bin))

The more complicated way is to change the factor levels.

Top to Bottom

Situation: AFTER you display bar charts in a specific order because you successfully specified the factor levels order, you simply want to reverse the order (from top-to-bottom).

Context: I’ve created a specific factor order and simply want to reverse the order so what was on top is now on the bottom, using scale_y_descrete(limits = rev()), the rev() and levels() function are used in tandem to specific the reverse.

new %>%
    count(name) %>%
    ggplot(aes(x = n, y = name, fill = name)) +
    geom_col() +
    geom_text(aes(label = n), hjust = -0.2, color = "white") +
    # reverse from top to bottom on the y-axis
    # note levels for a specific column new$name already set previously
    scale_y_discrete(limits = rev(levels(new$name))) 

Right to Left

Works the same way, but using scale_x_discrete.

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