How to Fix: could not find function “ggplot” in R

In this article, we will be looking at the approaches to fix the error: could not find function “ggplot”.

The R compiler throws this error when we try to generate a plot using the ggplot2 data visualization package, but couldn’t load the package first due to a failure.  This article focuses on how we can fix this error. There are five different ways using which this error can be fixed:

When this error might occur

Example

R

# Create a data frame
dataframe <- data.frame(x=c(4, 7, 2, 19, 10, 11, 12, 13),
                 y=c(18, 37, 47, 42, 45, 54, 68, 76))

# Create a scatterplot of x and y
ggplot(dataframe, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point()

Output:

Error in ggplot(dataframe, aes(x = x, y = y)) : 
  could not find function "ggplot"

The compiler produces such an error because we didn’t load the ggplot2 package in the R environment.

Fixing the error

There are five different ways using which this error can be fixed.

Method 1:

We can fix this error by loading the ggplot2 package with the help of the library function. The entire program is given below:

R

# Loading library
library(ggplot2)

# Create a data frame
dataframe <- data.frame(x=c(4, 7, 2, 19, 10, 11, 12, 13),
                 y=c(18, 37, 47, 42, 45, 54, 68, 76))

# Create a scatterplot of x vs. y
ggplot(dataframe, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point()

Output:

ggplot2 in R

Method 2:

If fix1 doesn’t work then there might be a possibility that ggplot2 is not installed in your system. We can install the package by using the below command in the R console:

Method 3: Install ggplot2 with dependencies

If fix 2 doesn’t work then it might be possible that the packages on which ggplot2 depends couldn’t be installed on the system. Thus, we need to install packages on which ggplot2 depends.

install.packages("ggplot2", dependencies=TRUE)

Method 4: If the fix3 doesn’t work then we can try to remove the ggplot2 and reinstall it once again.

remove.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages("ggplot2")