Bar chart color customization in Matplotlib - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Bar chart color customization

📖 Scenario: You work in a small bakery and want to show how many cakes you sold each day last week. You want to make a bar chart to show this clearly to your team.

🎯 Goal: Create a bar chart using matplotlib that shows the number of cakes sold each day. Customize the colors of the bars so that each day has a different color.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called sales with days of the week as keys and number of cakes sold as values.

Create a list called colors with a different color for each day.

Use matplotlib.pyplot.bar() to make a bar chart with the sales data and the colors list.

Display the bar chart with plt.show().

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Businesses often use bar charts to show sales or performance data clearly to teams and customers.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists use color customization in charts to make reports easier to understand and visually appealing.

1

Create the sales data dictionary

Create a dictionary called sales with these exact entries: 'Monday': 20, 'Tuesday': 35, 'Wednesday': 30, 'Thursday': 25, 'Friday': 40, 'Saturday': 50, 'Sunday': 45.

Matplotlib

# Create the sales dictionary with days and cake counts
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create the dictionary with the exact days and numbers.

2

Create a list of colors for the bars

Create a list called colors with these exact color names in order: 'red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', 'indigo', 'violet'.

Matplotlib

sales = {'Monday': 20, 'Tuesday': 35, 'Wednesday': 30, 'Thursday': 25, 'Friday': 40, 'Saturday': 50, 'Sunday': 45}
# Create the colors list with the 7 colors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Make sure the list has exactly these colors in this order.

3

Create the bar chart with colors

Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt. Use plt.bar() with the days from sales.keys(), the cake counts from sales.values(), and the colors list to set the bar colors.

Matplotlib

sales = {'Monday': 20, 'Tuesday': 35, 'Wednesday': 30, 'Thursday': 25, 'Friday': 40, 'Saturday': 50, 'Sunday': 45}
colors = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', 'indigo', 'violet']
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Create the bar chart with plt.bar() using sales keys, sales values, and colors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use plt.bar() with the color parameter set to the colors list.

4

Display the bar chart

Use plt.show() to display the bar chart you created.

Matplotlib

sales = {'Monday': 20, 'Tuesday': 35, 'Wednesday': 30, 'Thursday': 25, 'Friday': 40, 'Saturday': 50, 'Sunday': 45}
colors = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', 'indigo', 'violet']
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.bar(sales.keys(), sales.values(), color=colors)
# Show the bar chart
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call plt.show() to display the chart window.