How to Order the Months Chronologically in Ggplot2 Short of Writing the Months Out

How can I order the months chronologically in ggplot2 short of writing the months out?

Use the built-in month.name or month.abb variable to specify the levels of your factor in the correct order. In this case, you have abbreviations so month.abb is appropriate.

your_data$month = factor(your_data$month, levels = month.abb)

I think creating the factor in the correct order is the best way, but you can also just order the axis using the limits argument of the discrete scale (see ?discrete_scale for more info).

+ scale_x_discrete(limits = month.abb)

Locales

If you are in a non-English locale, you can construct your own month name constants with a little date formatting (basically stolen from Brian Ripley in this R-Help thread):

 month.name.loc = format(ISOdate(2004, 1:12, 1), "%B")
 month.abb.loc  = format(ISOdate(2004, 1:12, 1), "%b")

If you want to use month names/abbreviations from a different locale than you're in, the withr package is useful.

How to plot into month-year order instead of alphabetic order in ggplot?

Using lubridate to make a date from the month column

monthplot <- monthplot %>% 
  mutate(date = lubridate::dmy(month, truncated = -1))

ggplot(monthplot, aes(x = date, y = visits)) +
  geom_col(fill = "#0073C2FF") +
  geom_text(aes(label = visits), vjust = -0.3) + 
  theme_pubclean()

If you want to change how the date is shown, use scale_x_date and set the date_breaks and/or date_labels arguments

Arrange the labels of monthly time series in ggplot, R

Setting month as a factor and specifying the order of the levels (with the argument levels) solves the issue, as below.

month<-c("May","June","July","August","September","May","June","July","August","September")
    year<-c("1985","1985","1985","1985","1985","1986","1986","1986","1986","1986")

value<-c(2,6,4,5,9,7,2,6,5,4)

df<-data.frame(month,year,value)

df$month <- factor(df$month, levels = c("May", "June", "July", "August", "September"))

ggplot(df, aes(x=month, y=value,group=year))+theme_bw()+theme(plot.background = element_blank(),panel.grid.major = element_blank()
                                  ,panel.grid.minor = element_blank()) +ylim(0,10)+labs(x="Month",y=expression(bold(paste("variable here"))))+
    theme(axis.title.x = element_text(face="bold", size=12),axis.text.x = element_text(size=9))+
    theme(axis.title.y = element_text(face="bold", size=12),axis.text.y = element_text(size=9))+theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1))+
    geom_line(linetype="solid", size=1)+geom_point(color="gray7", size=2,shape=15)

sorting months in R with count or summarise

Since you have no sample data provided, I can't test if it really works in your specific case. Converting your months-data to a factor works, but you'll have to specify the names of the months first (in the language of your data), as R doesn't know how you want them to be ordered. Thus, creating a factor without defining the levels will only lead to alphabetical order, which isn't correct for months.

library(dplyr)

result <- mydata %>%
  mutate(ordered_months = factor(months(as.Date(orderdate)), 
                                 levels=c("January", "February", ...))) %>% # insert all month-names here
  count(ordered_months)
result

...should work.

Creating ggplot with segregated columns

You should try to add scale_x_discrete functions and pass the ordering in the argument limits:

ggplot(df, aes(Month.of.Death, fill=Month.of.Death))+
  geom_bar(color="black",fill="brown3")+
  theme(text = element_text(size=15),axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1))+
  labs(title = "Liczba śmierci dziennikarzy w danym miesiącu", x="Miesiąc", y="Liczba dziennikarzy")+
  scale_x_discrete(limits = c("January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December","Unknown"))

If this is not working, please consider to add a reproducible example of your dataset as specified here: How to make a great R reproducible example

Can I chronologically order dates as characters in R?

openingData %>% 
  mutate(dateOpened = as.Date(dateOpened,"%m/%d/%y")) %>% 
  arrange(dateOpened) %>% 
  mutate(id = factor(row_number(),labels = dateOpened)) %>% 
  ggplot() + 
  geom_col(mapping = aes(x = id, y = daysPrior))+
  labs(x = "Date Opened", y = "Days prior to opening at or above 11.0")

Sorting months in R

You could always convert your data to a factor. For example, suppose we have

x = c("January", "February", "March", "January")  

then to convert to a factor, we have:

x_fac = factor(x, levels = month.name)

which on sorting gives:

R> sort(x_fac)
[1] January  January  February March   
12 Levels: January February March April May June July August ... December

Boxplot with ggplot2 in R - returns by month

First, add new column month to your original data frame containing month.name (built-in constant in R) and use it as factor. It is import to set also levels= inside the factor() to ensure that months are arranged in chronological order not the alphabetical.

Then melt this data frame from wide format to long format. In ggplot() use month as x values and value as y.

df$month<-factor(month.name,levels=month.name)
library(reshape2)
df.long<-melt(df,id.vars="month")
ggplot(df.long,aes(month,value))+geom_boxplot()

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