How can I change the scale of the y axis in a barplot in ggplot2 to thousands?

Question

I am using this code:

ggplot2::ggplot(DATAFRAME, aes(x = as.factor(VARIABLE))) + ggplot2::geom_bar()

to plot the number of occurences in each level of the variable VARIABLE in the data frame DATAFRAME. However, it is quite a long data frame, so I would like to have the counts in thousands instead of units. Does anybody know how to do this?

Answer 1

You can use a custom function as a formatter for the labels. Just add this to your plot

+ scale_y_continuous(name = "Count (thousands)",
    labels = function(y) y / 1000)

For a reproducible example:

ggplot(data.frame(x = 1:2, y = 3:4 * 1000)) + 
    geom_point(aes(x, y)) +
    scale_y_continuous(
        name = "Axis in thousands",
        labels = function(x) x / 1000
)

If you want to get fancy, you could even paste "k" onto the end of the numbers:

labels = function(x) paste0(x / 1000, "k")