How do I change the formatting of numbers on an axis with ggplot?

Question

Another option is to format your axis tick labels with commas is by using the package scales, and add

 scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = comma)

to your ggplot statement.

If you don't want to load the package, use:

scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = scales::comma)

I also found another way of doing this that gives proper 'x10(superscript)5' notation on the axes. I'm posting it here in the hope it might be useful to some. I got the code from here so I claim no credit for it, that rightly goes to Brian Diggs.

fancy_scientific <- function(l) {
     # turn in to character string in scientific notation
     l <- format(l, scientific = TRUE)
     # quote the part before the exponent to keep all the digits
     l <- gsub("^(.*)e", "'\\1'e", l)
     # turn the 'e+' into plotmath format
     l <- gsub("e", "%*%10^", l)
     # return this as an expression
     parse(text=l)
}

Which you can then use as

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
   geom_point() +
   scale_y_continuous(labels=fancy_scientific) 

x <- rnorm(10) * 100000
y <- seq(0, 1, length = 10)
p <- qplot(x, y)
library(scales)
p + scale_x_continuous(labels = comma)

I'm late to the game here but in-case others want an easy solution, I created a set of functions which can be called like:

 ggplot + scale_x_continuous(labels = human_gbp)

which give you human readable numbers for x or y axes (or any number in general really).

You can find the functions here: Github Repo Just copy the functions in to your script so you can call them.

I find Jack Aidley's suggested answer a useful one.

I wanted to throw out another option. Suppose you have a series with many small numbers, and you want to ensure the axis labels write out the full decimal point (e.g. 5e-05 -> 0.0005), then:

NotFancy <- function(l) {
 l <- format(l, scientific = FALSE)
 parse(text=l)
}

ggplot(data = data.frame(x = 1:100, 
                         y = seq(from=0.00005,to = 0.0000000000001,length.out=100) + runif(n=100,-0.0000005,0.0000005)), 
       aes(x=x, y=y)) +
     geom_point() +
     scale_y_continuous(labels=NotFancy)