R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Plotting the date or time variable on the x axis

In this recipe, we will learn how to plot formatted date or time values on the x axis.

Getting ready

For the first example, we only need to use the plot() base graphics function.

How to do it...

We will use the dailysales.csv example dataset to plot the number of units of a product sold daily in a month:

sales<-read.csv("dailysales.csv")
plot(sales$units~as.Date(sales$date,"%d/%m/%y"),type="l",
xlab="Date",ylab="Units Sold")

How it works...

Once we have formatted the series of dates using as.Date(), we can simply pass it to the plot() function as the x variable in either the plot(x,y) or plot(y~x) format. ...