Plotly Interactive Graphing Library

Posted by Edward-Beck on November 15, 2019

In an effort to impress and manipulate others into giving you money may I offer plotly, the reactive graphing library that takes matplotlib and seaborn to the next level. Like most other libraries in python plotly provides a tool kit does all the heavy lifting of the backend processing and leaves the users to the declarative programming and being creative. This library has the basic graphs such as scatter, histogram, bar plot, etc but the viewer is then able to narrow or broaden the graphs by altering the axises. With plotly a model of the data to be displayed must be created called a data object that is then passed into a layout. However altering the scope of the graph is just the beginning as different plots can be added or subtracted via a dropdown menu. And as much as I’ve tried to transition from my career as a used car salesmen…(slaps the roof of plotly)….plotly has so much more to offer! For instance multiple graphs can be synced together to so as to form a video as values change over time. The option to project graphs onto images is easily accessible. Can you adjust the span of a time series with a slide bar in Seaborn because you certainly can in Plotly. Did you ever want to annotate the figures you created with monthly highs or lows because with a couple lines of code you can do that too. Perhaps the greatest aspect of it all is interactive figures can then be exported png, jpeg, webp, svg, and pdfs. Lastly and BY FAR most importantly don’t simply use plotly, unless you’re a real psycho because plotly express and cufflinks give you the entire library in a fraction of the number of lines of code.