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About this lesson

In this video, we explain how to create bar plots using your data.

Exercise files

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Plotting Bar Plots.docx
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Quick reference

Plotting Bar Plots

There are two main methods for creating bar plots.

When to use

Use either of these two methods when you need to create a bar plot.

Instructions

The first method for creating a bar plot:

   my_df.plot(kind='bar')

To stack your bar plot:

   my_df.plot(kind='bar', stacked=True)

The second method for creating a bar plot:

   my_df.plot.bar()

Hints & tips

  • my_df.plot(kind='bar')
  • my_df.plot.bar()
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  • 00:05 Okay, in the last video, we looked at area plots.
  • 00:08 In this video, we want to look at bar plots.
  • 00:10 So to create a bar plot, we would just
  • 00:15 go my_df.plot and then set the kind equal to bar.
  • 00:20 And if we run this, we get something that's kind of hard to read because we've
  • 00:25 got a lot of data points here.
  • 00:27 We got 50. So maybe we want to come up here to our
  • 00:30 data and instead of 50 rows, maybe we'll just try 10.
  • 00:36 Run that again, run that again.
  • 00:38 Here we have zero through nine, that's probably a little more manageable.
  • 00:43 And if we run this, we're seeing we have positive and negative values
  • 00:48 because we look back at our data, again, we have positive and negative numbers.
  • 00:53 So maybe we just want to do absolute values again.
  • 00:57 So these will all be positive, just so it's easier to see this.
  • 01:01 And here we have our bar plot.
  • 01:03 Very cool.
  • 01:04 We can also designate these to be stacked.
  • 01:07 So we can go stacked=True.
  • 01:11 And then now, we get the same thing, it's just with stacked values.
  • 01:16 So, this is how you do bar plots.
  • 01:18 You could do them another way as well.
  • 01:19 We can just go my_df and let's make this an absolute value again.
  • 01:25 And then we can call .plot.bar and we get the same value.
  • 01:31 That's just sort of a short way to do it.
  • 01:33 I kind of liked to do kind='bar' when I do mine, just so I'm clear.
  • 01:38 And not all of our charts that we do, you can do a dot off of plot.
  • 01:42 Some of them you have to do kind equals whatever.
  • 01:46 So I just tend to do it like this.
  • 01:47 So, pretty cool.
  • 01:49 And inside of here, of course, still we can go stack=True, just like before,
  • 01:54 and this becomes true.
  • 01:55 We can do all of our other things too, Legend=False.
  • 02:01 We do that, our legend disappears.
  • 02:04 If we want grid lines, we could go grid=True.
  • 02:07 And now we get grid lines.
  • 02:12 And just in the last video, if we want a title we can say,
  • 02:17 title='Bar Plot' or whatever.
  • 02:20 And we get bar plot.
  • 02:23 Personally I don't do much like the grid marks for
  • 02:26 this, so I'm going to take that off.
  • 02:28 And again, you don't have to do absolute values.
  • 02:30 If you want your data to go up and down, maybe take off the stack for that.
  • 02:36 There we go, all right.
  • 02:38 kind of interesting and pretty simple.
  • 02:40 So we've got bar plots.
  • 02:43 We've got area plots.
  • 02:46 We've got the basic histogram.
  • 02:48 In the next video, we'll look at line plots.

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