GrapheR: A GUI for base graphics in R

5 comments
How did I miss the GrapheR package?

The author, Maxime Hervé, published an article about the package [1] in the same issue of the R Journal as we did on googleVis. Yet, it took me a package update notification on CRANbeeries to look into GrapheR in more detail - 3 years later! And what a wonderful gem GrapheR is.

The package provides a graphical user interface for creating base charts in R. It is ideal for beginners in R, as the user interface is very clear and the code is written along side into a text file, allowing users to recreate the charts directly in the console.

Adding and changing legends? Messing around with the plotting window settings? It is much easier/quicker with this GUI than reading the help file and trying to understand the various parameters.

Here is a little example using the iris data set.
library(GrapheR)
data(iris)
run.GrapheR()
This will bring up a window that helps me to create the chart and tweak the various parameters.


Once I am happy with my configuration I hit DRAW and R will create the chart for me.


Finally, I find the underlying R code in a file created by GrapheR. For more details read also the package vignette, which is available in English, French and German!

R code



References


[1] Hervé M (2011) GrapheR: a multiplatform GUI for drawing customizable graphs in R. The R Journal 3(2): 45-53.

Session Info

R version 3.1.1 (2014-07-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.1.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] tcltk stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base     

other attached packages:
[1] GrapheR_1.9-84

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.1.1

5 comments :

dksamuel said...

makes using R easier, thanks for the writeup

fred1234 said...

> install.packages("GraphR")
Warning message:
package ‘GraphR’ is not available (for R version 3.1.1)

Markus Gesmann said...

Note, the package is called GrapheR not GraphR.

Nicholas Horton said...

This is really neat. A similar implementation has been made available within the "mosaic" package when running under RStudio. If you type the commands:

require(mosaic)
mplot(iris) # bivariate graphs
mplot(iris, default="density") # univariate graphs

you will see a "wheel" icon which allows you to manipulate the display. One nice feature: it will output lattice or ggplot2 expressions that you create. Kudos to Randall Pruim of Project MOSAIC and Calvin College for this implementation.

Markus Gesmann said...

Brilliant! I didn't know about the package.

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