Achieve Charting Zen With TauCharts

There was some chatter on the twitters this week about a relatively new D3-based charting library called TauCharts (also @taucharts). The API looked pretty clean and robust, so I started working on an htmlwidget for it and was quickly joined by the Widget Master himself, @timelyportfolio.

TauCharts definitely has a “grammar of graphics” feel about it and the default aesthetics are super-nifty While the developers are actively adding new features and “geoms”, the core points (think scatterplot), lines and bars (including horizontal bars!) geoms are quite robust and definitely ready for your dashboards.

Between the two of us, we have a substantial part of the charting library API covered. I think the only major thing left unimplemented is composite charts (i.e. lines + bars + points on the same chart) and some minor tweaks around the edges.

While you can find it on github and do the normal:

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/taucharts")

or, even use the official initial release version:

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/taucharts@v0.1.0")

I’ll use the dev version:

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/taucharts@dev"

for the example below, mostly since it includes the data set I want to use to mimic the current, featured example on the TauCharts homepage and also has full documentation with examples.

Here’s all it takes to make a faceted scatterplot with:

• interactive tooltips
• interactive legend
• custom-selectable trendline annotation:

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/taucharts@dev")

library(taucharts)

data(cars_data)

tauchart(cars_data) %>% 
  tau_point("milespergallon", c("class", "price"), color="class") %>% 
  tau_guide_padding(bottom=300) %>% 
  tau_legend() %>% 
  tau_trendline() %>% 
  tau_tooltip(c("vehicle", "year", "class", "price", "milespergallon"))

There are tons more examples in the TauCharts RPub (and soon-to-be vignette) and @timelyportfolio will be featuring it in his weekly widget update.