Interactive plots with the ggplot GUI package

The ggplot GUI package is excellent for making quick plots using the ggplot package, using a drag-and-drop approach. It will allow us to export the plots easily, and it will generate the corresponding ggplot code that creates the plots. It uses the excellent Shiny package to create a fully interactive approach for creating plots.

Most interestingly, the package has several different types of plots such as violin plots, histograms, scatterplots, and many more.

Getting ready

In order to install this package, we can use the install.packages("ggplotgui") command.

How to do it...

In this example, we will first create a histogram for the miles per gallon of vehicles from a dataset, and then produce a scatterplot showing the relationship between the miles per gallon and the horsepower of those vehicles.

1. We call the ggplot_shiny() function with an argument specifying that we want to work with the mtcars dataset:

library("ggplotgui")
ggplot_shiny(mtcars)

The following screenshot shows the ggplot GUI interface :

2. Doing a scatterplot is equally simple—we need to just choose the Scatter option and then the X-variables and Y-variables. We could also choose a grouping variable if we wanted to incorporate an extra dimension into this plot:

How it works...

This function will launch an interactive interface that we can use very easily. We just select the variables, the type of plot, and the format that we want. Finally, we can save the output as an image. The R code tab can be used to obtain the corresponding R code.

There's more...

We can do this instead, and we will be able to use a drag-and-drop approach to load datasets, instead of passing one as an argument:

ggplot_shiny()