Question

When I use geom_tile() with ggplot2 and discrete scales the labels are in ascending order on the x-axis and in descending order on the y-axis:

#some sample data
a <- runif(400)
a <- matrix(a, ncol=20)
colnames(a) <- letters[seq( from = 1, to = 20 )]
rownames(a) <- letters[seq( from = 1, to = 20 )]
a <- melt(a)

When I plot the dataframe a this comes out:

ggplot(a, aes(X1, X2, fill = value)) + geom_tile() + 
scale_fill_gradient(low = "white",  high = "black", breaks=seq(from=0, to=1, by=.1), name="value") + 
opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=-90, hjust=0)) +
scale_x_discrete(name="") + scale_y_discrete(name="") 

and the coords are labeled differently for x and y:

I would like to have the labels sorted from a-z from top to bottom and from left to right. is there a quick way to do this?

Answer 1

The important point here is the order of the factor levels. The order in the levels is also the order in the plot. You can use rev to reverse the order of the levels like this (note that I just reorder one column in a data.frame):

df$X1 = with(df, factor(X1, levels = rev(levels(X1))))

Use this syntax to reorder your factors as needed.