r grouped barplot from Excel CSV file - r

Question

I'm trying to make a grouped barplot in r, but there are some things I cannot figure out. This is what I have so far:
I would like:
to create a matrix from the data.frame (.csv file, see below)
the ablines to appear, but not in front of the bars
labels for the grouped bars (November, December, January, ... ->see data below)
for the plot layout to be as shown below. (I basically want the plot border)
I used the following code:
x<-matrix(nrow=3,ncol=7, data=c(200,227,196,210,279,319,220,126,111,230,196,123,240,106,94,250,154,233,260,226,218))
tiff("p_month_all.tiff", width=600, height=300)
par(mar=c(5,4,0.5,0.5))
a=c("November","December","January","February","March","April","May")
barplot(x, beside=TRUE, ylim=c(0,350),xlab="Month", axes=TRUE,axis.lty=1, ylab="Monthly Precipitation [mm]", col=c("darkblue","dodgerblue3","deepskyblue1"),panel.first= abline(h = c(50,100,150,200,250,300), col = "grey", lty = 2), xaxt="n", yaxt="n")
par(ps=12, cex =1, cex.main=2)
axis(2, c(0,350, c(50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300)), las=1)
dev.off()
The data set (.csv file) looks like this:
Month Hornberg Strick Huetten
November 120 278 234
December 279 156 145
January 328 300 299
February 267 259 234
March 190 201 187
April 150 199 177
May 147 156 160

Answer 1

I've rewritten your code for clarity so you can see more easily what the problem is.
You were suppressing the axes with xaxt = "n" and yaxt = "n". I removed those lines.
Adding a call to box draws the box around the plot.
Adding a call to grid draws gridlines in the plot.
I've added row and column names to your data matrix so the plot know what to use in the axes.
I've updated the plot margins.
I also tidied a few bits like replacing month names with month.name and using seq.int rather than a hard-coded sequence.
x <- matrix(
c(
200, 227, 196,
210, 279, 319,
220, 126, 111,
230, 196, 123,
240, 106, 94,
250, 154, 233,
260, 226, 218
),
nrow = 3,
ncol = 7
)
colnames(x) <- month.name[c(11:12, 1:5)]
rownames(x) <- c("Hornberg", "Strick", "Huetten")
par(mar = c(5, 4, 1.5, 0.5), ps = 12, cex = 1, cex.main = 2, las = 1)
barplot(
x,
beside = TRUE,
ylim = c(0,350),
xlab = "Month",
axes = TRUE,
axis.lty = 1,
ylab = "Monthly Precipitation [mm]",
col = c("darkblue", "dodgerblue3", "deepskyblue1"),
panel.first = abline(
h = seq.int(50, 300, 50),
col = "grey",
lty = 2
)
)
box()
grid()

Answer 2

So, first of all, look through ggplot2 documentation, it's pretty good http://docs.ggplot2.org/0.9.3.1/index.html
If you haven't found an answer for your question, never give up googling :)
Ok, about your question:
Create data
help(read.csv) -> import your data to data.frame named x
Prepare data for the plot:
Melt your data to use it for the plot
x<-melt(x)
Use Month variable as a factor and order by month:
x$Month=factor(x$Month,level=month.name)
x<-x[order(x$Month),]
Plot the graph using ggplot2 (as you tagged it here and it's straitforward in use)
ggplot(x,aes(x=Month,y=value,fill=variable))+geom_bar(stat="bin",position="dodge")+theme_bw()+ylab("Monthly Precipitation [mm]")+xlab("Month")
For the colours, can use scale_fill_brewer() (great tutorials here:http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/Colors_%28ggplot2%29/)
ggplot(x,aes(x=Month,y=value,fill=variable))+geom_bar(stat="bin",position="dodge")+theme_bw()+ylab("Monthly Precipitation [mm]")+xlab("Month")+scale_fill_brewer(palette="Blues")