How to Change the Order of Facet Labels in Ggplot (Custom Facet Wrap Labels)

How to change the order of facet labels in ggplot (custom facet wrap labels)

Don't rely on the default ordering of levels imposed by factor() or internally by ggplot if the grouping variable you supply is not a factor. Set the levels explicitly yourself.

dat <- data.frame(x = runif(100), y = runif(100), 
                  Group = gl(5, 20, labels = LETTERS[1:5]))
head(dat)
with(dat, levels(Group))

What if I want them in this arbitrary order?

set.seed(1)
with(dat, sample(levels(Group)))

To do this, set the levels the way you want them.

set.seed(1) # reset the seed so I get the random order form above
dat <- within(dat, Group <- factor(Group, levels = sample(levels(Group))))
with(dat, levels(Group))

Now we can use this to have the panels drawn in the order we want:

require(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(dat, aes(x = x)) + geom_bar()
p + facet_wrap( ~ Group)

Which produces:

Reformat label / preserve order of Multi-factor facets in ggplot2::facet_wrap() based on factor level

Wow, that was a lot trickier than I expected... One solution would be to combine them into a different field:

tmp.d |> 
  arrange(sector, subsector) |>          # arrange by factor levels
  mutate(
    facet = 
      paste0(sector, ": ", subsector) |>    
      fct_inorder(ordered = TRUE)        # use that order for the new field
  ) |> 
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = value, group = 1)) +
  geom_path()+
  facet_wrap(facets = ~facet)            # here

This also works if a ", " is acceptable:

ggplot(tmp.d, aes(x = year, y = value, group = 1)) +
  geom_path()+
  facet_wrap(
    facets = sector~subsector, 
    labeller = 
      labeller(                  # here
        sector = label_value,    #
        subsector = label_value, #
        .multi_line = FALSE      #
      )
  )

A similar thing can be done with purrr::partial() which substitutes out defaults but again you get a comma. I think it would be worth creating an issue on their github page to add a sep argument to the label_*() functions

... +
  facet_wrap(
    facets = sector~subsector, 
    labeller = purrr::partial(label_value, multi_line = FALSE)
  )

How to change facet labels?

Change the underlying factor level names with something like:

# Using the Iris data
> i <- iris
> levels(i$Species)
[1] "setosa"     "versicolor" "virginica" 
> levels(i$Species) <- c("S", "Ve", "Vi")
> ggplot(i, aes(Petal.Length)) + stat_bin() + facet_grid(Species ~ .)

ggplot ordering facet labels by value

This is another approach inspired by the following github repository: https://github.com/dgrtwo/drlib/blob/master/R/reorder_within.R

You have to create the following functions, in order to manage facets' order:

reorder_within <- function(x, by, within, fun = mean, sep = "___", ...) {
    new_x <- paste(x, within, sep = sep)
    stats::reorder(new_x, by, FUN = fun)
}


scale_x_reordered <- function(..., sep = "___") {
    reg <- paste0(sep, ".+$")
    ggplot2::scale_x_discrete(labels = function(x) gsub(reg, "", x), ...)
}

then you may apply them on your data:

ggplot(mydata, aes(reorder_within(firstFactor, desc(value), secondFactor), value)) +
    geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
    scale_x_reordered() +
    facet_wrap(~ secondFactor, scales = "free_x",ncol=1) +
    xlab("make")

and this is the result:

Fixing the order of facets in ggplot

Make your size a factor in your dataframe by:

temp$size_f = factor(temp$size, levels=c('50%','100%','150%','200%'))

Then change the facet_grid(.~size) to facet_grid(.~size_f)

Then plot:

The graphs are now in the correct order.

R Changing Order of Facets

dfx$group <- factor(dfx$group, levels = c("SLG","BA"))

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