11.38 Labels with Comma

20200428

ds %>%
  ggplot(aes(wind_dir_9am, fill=wind_dir_9am)) +
  geom_bar() +
  scale_y_continuous(labels=comma) +
  theme(legend.position="none") +
  labs(x=vnames["wind_dir_9am"], y="Count")

With ggplot2 (Wickham, Chang, et al. 2026) Version 0.9.0 the package introduced a mechanism to handle many of the scale operations, in such a way as to support base and lattice graphics, as well as graphics. Scale operations include position guides, as in the axes, and aesthetic guides, as in the legend.

The function scales::comma() is useful for presenting numbers using commas to separate the thousands. This is always a good idea as it assists the reader in quickly determining the magnitude of the numbers we are looking at. As a matter of course, I recommend commas in plots (and tables) at all times. To do so use the ggplot2::scale_continuous() function with labels=comma.

References

Wickham, Hadley, Winston Chang, Lionel Henry, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Kohske Takahashi, Claus Wilke, Kara Woo, Hiroaki Yutani, Dewey Dunnington, and Teun van den Brand. 2026. Ggplot2: Create Elegant Data Visualisations Using the Grammar of Graphics. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org.

---

If you find this curated material useful then you can consider a donation to support it's ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. The material has been scoped up by Generative AI without permission or any kind of recompense so do consider a donation if you can afford it. Unlike Generative AI your access to this materials is freely given. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Togaware has a 30 year tradition of making popular open source software which includes sold privacy preserving productivity apps, rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0