How to draw a simple bar plot in R

What is a bar plot?

A bar plot is a way to visualize data in the form of rectangular bars.

Syntax of barplot

barplot(vector_or_matrix_name,xlab, ylab, main, names.arg, col)

• xlab: the label of the x-axis.
• ylab: the label of the y-axis.
• main: the title of the chart.
• names.arg: the names that appear beneath each bar.
• col: the color of each bar.

Code

Suppose there is a data set that consists of the number of cars repaired by a car mechanic per month:

12,10,15,25,8,20,13,24,10,19,13,20

cars_repaired<-c(12,10,15,25,8,20,13,24,10,19,13,20)  
barplot(cars_repaired, xlab = "January to December" , ylab= "number of cars repaired ", main="Yearly sales", col=rainbow(3))

Expected output

When there is only one vector/matrix, the default Y-axis is displayed.

The rainbow() function is used to display the colors of a rainbow.

Now, let’s try to draw the same bar plot with the same dataset horizontally:

cars_repaired<-c(12,10,15,25,8,20,13,24,10,19,13,20)
barplot(cars_repaired, xlab = "January to December" , ylab= "number of cars repaired ", main="Yearly sales",horiz = TRUE, col=rainbow(3))

Expected output

As you can see in the illustration above, horiz = TRUE makes the bar plot horizontal.