How do you specifically order ggplot2 x axis instead of alphabetical order?

The accepted answer offers a solution which requires changing of the underlying data frame. This is not necessary. One can also simply factorise within the aes() call directly or create a vector for that instead.

This is certainly not much different than user Drew Steen's answer, but with the important difference of not changing the original data frame.

level_order <- c('virginica', 'versicolor', 'setosa') #this vector might be useful for other plots/analyses

ggplot(iris, aes(x = factor(Species, level = level_order), y = Petal.Width)) + geom_col()

or

level_order <- factor(iris$Species, level = c('virginica', 'versicolor', 'setosa'))

ggplot(iris, aes(x = level_order, y = Petal.Width)) + geom_col()

or
directly in the aes() call without a pre-created vector:

ggplot(iris, aes(x = factor(Species, level = c('virginica', 'versicolor', 'setosa')), y = Petal.Width)) + geom_col()

that's for the first version


It is a little difficult to answer your specific question without a full, reproducible example. However something like this should work:

#Turn your 'treatment' column into a character vector
data$Treatment <- as.character(data$Treatment)
#Then turn it back into a factor with the levels in the correct order
data$Treatment <- factor(data$Treatment, levels=unique(data$Treatment))

In this example, the order of the factor will be the same as in the data.csv file.

If you prefer a different order, you can order them by hand:

data$Treatment <- factor(data$Treatment, levels=c("Y", "X", "Z"))

However this is dangerous if you have a lot of levels: if you get any of them wrong, that will cause problems.

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