Time series data visualization made easy for Excel users and R programmers.

Installation

Download RStudio or R.
Open RStudio or R, and install the package devtools if you don’t have it already:
```
install.packages("devtools", repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org")
```
As an alternative to devtools you can use remotes.
With the devtools package you can install nicerplot directly from github.
```
devtools::install_github("data-science-made-easy/nicerplot")
```

Congratulations, you now have the cutting-edge development version of nicerplot!

In some cases, however, e.g. if you want work on common version together with others, you may prefer to install a stable release. In that case you can add ref = <tag>, to the above install_github command. You can find the tag left of the release (e.g. ref = 'v0.1.2').

Hello World example

The example below defines a data.frame with two series of data:

x <- 0:6
d <- data.frame(x, first = (6 - x)^2, second = x^2)
nicerplot::nplot(d, title = 'Hello World', x_title = 'x', y_title = 'y', footnote = "just an example")

This generates a figure in./generated/hello-world.png in your working directory (see: getwd()):

Nicerplot can visualize data in the following objects:

data.frame, see the above example
matrix, similar to data.frame
ts, mts, (multivariate) time series objects
character, if it is a ‘path/to/an-Excel-file.xlsx’
- e.g., nplot('hello-world.xlsx') reproduces the above figure (first download hello-world.xlsx)
character, if it is a URL that points to data on Statistics Netherlands
- e.g. nplot('https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/dataset/83913NED/table?dl=323FD', title = 'Dutch housing market', y_title = 'prices (2015 = 100)', hline_bold = 100, file = 'url-example') plots actual house prices and saves it as ‘url-example.png’
list, with elements of the above objects and/or a ‘sub-list’

The manual explains in great detail how to structure the above objects well.

Change the layout

Instead of lines you can plot ‘stacked bars’ by using parameter type = 'bar=' (use type = 'bar-- for shouldered bars):

library(nicerplot) # this exports function 'nplot()'
nplot(d, title = 'Shouldered bars', x_title = 'x', y_title = 'y', type = 'bar--', file = 'Hello-World-shouldered-bars')
nplot(d, title = 'Stacked bars', x_title = 'x', y_title = 'y', footnote = 'with turn = TRUE', type = 'bar=', file = 'Hello-World-stacked-bars', turn = TRUE)

Manual

The manual provides many other examples. Below each figure in this manual you can find the R-code to reproduce that figure with this package.

Details

The default

font is ‘RijksoverheidSansText’. If that font is unavailable, ‘sans’ will be selected.
language is Dutch, so the decimal (thousand) separator is a comma (point). Use style = 'english' to swap those two separators.