Horizontal bar chart with plt.barh in Matplotlib - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Horizontal bar chart with plt.barh

📖 Scenario: You work in a small bakery and want to show how many cakes of each type you sold last week. You want to create a simple horizontal bar chart to share with your team.

🎯 Goal: Create a horizontal bar chart using plt.barh to display the number of cakes sold for each cake type.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called cake_types with the cake names exactly as: 'Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon', 'Carrot'

Create a list called cakes_sold with the numbers exactly as: 50, 40, 30, 20, 10

Use plt.barh to create a horizontal bar chart with cake_types on the y-axis and cakes_sold on the x-axis

Add labels for the x-axis as 'Number of Cakes Sold' and y-axis as 'Cake Type'

Display the chart using plt.show()

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Horizontal bar charts are useful to compare categories when category names are long or when you want to display data horizontally for better readability.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists often use horizontal bar charts to present categorical data clearly in reports and presentations.

1

Create the data lists

Create a list called cake_types with these exact values: 'Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon', 'Carrot'. Also create a list called cakes_sold with these exact numbers: 50, 40, 30, 20, 10.

Matplotlib

# Create the lists cake_types and cakes_sold with the exact values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create lists. Separate items with commas.

2

Import matplotlib and set up the plot

Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt. This will allow you to create the chart.

Matplotlib

cake_types = ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon', 'Carrot']
cakes_sold = [50, 40, 30, 20, 10]
# Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use import matplotlib.pyplot as plt to import the plotting library.

3

Create the horizontal bar chart

Use plt.barh with cake_types as the y-values and cakes_sold as the x-values to create a horizontal bar chart. Then add x-axis label 'Number of Cakes Sold' and y-axis label 'Cake Type'.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

cake_types = ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon', 'Carrot']
cakes_sold = [50, 40, 30, 20, 10]
# Create horizontal bar chart with plt.barh
# Add x-axis label and y-axis label
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use plt.barh(y, x) where y is the list of categories and x is the list of values.

4

Display the chart

Use plt.show() to display the horizontal bar chart.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

cake_types = ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon', 'Carrot']
cakes_sold = [50, 40, 30, 20, 10]

plt.barh(cake_types, cakes_sold)
plt.xlabel('Number of Cakes Sold')
plt.ylabel('Cake Type')
# Display the plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

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