To make such a plot, I would have thought your want your data structure to be:
yourdat: Column A: Date Column B; Chemical Column C: Result .... After subsetting this to the chemicals you want or doing the subsetting in your plot command, something like (base R) boxplot(Result ~ Chemical, subset=yourdat$Chemical %in% c("Ca","Cl", "Cond","Mg","Na","SO2","TDS")) You probably can get what you want one way or the other with your current data structure -- though you may have to use ggplot or trellis -- but it does appear to be inconvenient. Whether I'm correct or not in my understanding of your situation, an important message is: you should choose your data structure to facilitate the analysis that you have in mind. IMHO, this is one of R's great strengths: it provides rich facilities for manipulating data tightly integrated with plotting and analytical capabilities. Cheers, Bert On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com>wrote: > On Wed, 2 Nov 2011, Rich Shepard wrote: > > I want a subset of this with only 7 chemicals: Ca, Cl, Cond, Mg, Na, SO4, >> and TDS. >> > > I should have also written that what I ultimately want is to create a > box-and-whisker plot for these 7 chemicals in a single panel. If that can > be > done directly from the source data frame without creating another subset, I > want to learn the syntax for that. > > Rich > > ______________________________**________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/**listinfo/r-help<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help> > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/** > posting-guide.html <http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics Internal Contact Info: Phone: 467-7374 Website: http://pharmadevelopment.roche.com/index/pdb/pdb-functional-groups/pdb-biostatistics/pdb-ncb-home.htm [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.