Plotting graphs with Plotly for R

Recently been using Plotly for R to generate graphs and plots for my dissertation. Its really powerful, open source, and has a nice extension for Visual Studio Code - R Tools.

If you want to use it there is a lot of proper tutorials out there;

• R Tutorials: breaks down all the basics.
• Plotly’s Documentation: examples of all the graphing types.
• R Google Style Guide: quick and dirty style guide, if worried about some common standards.

Plotly - Example

Using a .csv generated from a different application, plotly makes it very easy to write an R script to visualise the data. An example of one script is below.

install.packages("plotly") # make sure we install the plotly package first
library(plotly) # setup the library

data <- read.csv("../path-to-our-csv/data.csv") # load in our data

p <-
  plot_ly(
    data,
    x = ~t, # match to the t column in data
    y = ~x, # match to the x column in data
    name = "wx",
    type = 'scatter',
    mode = 'lines'
  ) %>%
  add_trace(y = ~y, name = "wy", mode = 'lines') %>%
  add_trace(y = ~z, name = "wz", mode = 'lines') %>%
  layout(title = "Angular Speed Over Time",
          yaxis = list(title = "wx, wy, wz")) # make a pretty scatter plot

p # run it

Generates the following plot from this this data.

Here is a few other examples.

Notes

I could have exported to the Json Scema but it merges the presentation into the data which I didn’t like, so to keep it simple I just output to .csv then use different .R files to visualize the data.