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Matplotlib and seaborn are my Go-to
R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It’s so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.
Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it’s terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.
Oh this touches close to him. I got into pgfplots since it would generate plots in latex at compile time and keep fonts consistent, etc. plots looked amazing though.
The worst was when a colleague couldn’t get a pdf to upload into a google doc, so he just made an ugly ass bar chart in excel for the final draft since that was easier. The only reason he could do that so quickly was because he could read the data so easily from the plot I made. Ugh. Still burns
Facet grid is a godsend, haven’t seen anything like it in Excel. However, I will admit ggplot syntax and functionality is cryptic af, so I ask chatgpt for help and it’s surprisingly accurate on this topic
Probably because there were so many questions about it on the forums
Ggplot syntax (and tidyverse syntax in general) is incredibly clear when you compare it to the alternatives. Just try to use plotly to do anything simple and it’ll take 6x the time.
Honest question: do you think this could improve with practice? Or does the ggplot workflow necessarily makes it all slower?
It absolutely improves with practice, and once you have settled on an aesthetic you like you can simply reuse the code, e.g. store all your color/line properties in a variable and just update each figure with that variable
My thesis had something like 30 figures, and at multiple points I had to do things like “put these all on a log scale instead” or “whoops, data on row 143,827 looks like it was transcribed wrong, need to fix it”
While setting everything up in ggplot took a couple hours, making those changes to 30 figures in ggplot took seconds, whereas it would have taken a monumental amount of time to do manually in excel
Thanks for the reply! So Excel maybe is not as fast as the meme would suggest, I suppose.
Once you have figured it out, it’s actually a nice workflow. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m not publishing a paper, I quickly forget all commands, my whole setup etc. and start from scratch, cursing a lot and retracing my steps in the history, basically re-learning the framework. I’d still never move away from ggplot2.
I agree with you. I love ggplot2. And I’m good at it. So it’s my software of choice when doing data analysis and when making graphs.
However, I understand that there’s an upfront cost to pay to use it: learning to code, tidying data, etc…
And beyond that, I don’t really do data analysis with spreadsheet software like Excel or LibreCalc. So I don’t know if a proficient LibreCalc user would be able to compete with a proficient ggplot2 user.
I like Makie #JuliaGang
graphpad is my #1
