title: Using ggplot2, can I insert a break in the axis?
body: <p>I want to make a bar plot where one of the values is much bigger than all other values. Is there a way of having a discontinuous y-axis? My data is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df &lt;- data.frame(a = c(1,2,3,500), b = c('a1', 'a2','a3', 'a4'))
  
  p &lt;- ggplot(data = df, aes(x = b, y = a)) + geom_bar() 
  p &lt;- p + opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle= 90, hjust=1))  + coord_flip()
  p
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/hSBhK.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>Is there a way that I can make my axis run from 1- 10, then 490 - 500? I can't think of any other way of plotting the data (aside from transforming it, which I don't want to do)</p>
  
  <h3>[Edit 2019-05-06]:</h3>
  
  <p>8 years later, above code needs to be amended to work with version 3.1.1 of <code>ggplot2</code> in order to create the same chart:</p>
  
  <pre><code>library(ggplot2)
  ggplot(df) + 
    aes(x = b, y = a) +
    geom_col() +
    coord_flip()
  </code></pre>