What is Plotly?

  • Plotly’s Python graphing library makes interactive, publication-quality graphs online.
  • Every Plotly visualization or plot is a JSON object and there are three elements of a plot1:
    • Data: List objects in python which contains the traces (i.e., what is drawn to screen)
    • Layout: Object that defines the look of the plot
    • Figure: Final object to actually be plotted. It’s a dictionary-like object that contains both the data object and the layout object.

Diagram showing the three elements of a Plotly figure: Data (traces), Layout, and Figure object

Install Plotly & Pandas:

  • Packages such as Plotly and Pandas are available in a public repository called PyPI (Python Package Index)
  • The tool can be installed from the command line using the Python Management System, pip.
  • For Windows users, from the command line, running as an administrator, simply issue the following two commands:
pip install plotly
pip install pandas
  • For Mac users, from a terminal, simply issue the following two commands:
pip3 install plotly
pip3 install pandas

Footnotes

  1. Ravi, J. (n.d.). Building data visualizations using Plotly. Pluralsight. ↩