Building blocks for reusable high-quality graphs

To diagnose the business state and find new opportunities, in this chapter, we will use various types of graphs. When it comes to developing static high-quality graphs, you can't go wrong with the ggplot2 package. Standard (built-in) graphs in R are fine for exploratory purposes, but are not as flexible or nice-looking as ggplot2 graphs. Since we want to show how to create high-quality graphs, we will focus on using this package (and others extending it) for static graphs. However, since the vanilla ggplot2 package only works for static graphs, we will use other packages for high-quality interactive graphs.

A downside of having so much flexibility when using ggplot2 is that it's very verbose, thus requiring a lot of code to create graphs (specially when compared to standard R built-in graphing functions). We want to avoid having to copy-paste code if we are going to create similar graphs, so we will develop reusable functions that we can use...