Text placement with ax.text in Matplotlib - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Text placement with ax.text

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple plot to show the sales of a small shop over three days. You want to add text labels on the plot to clearly show the sales numbers on each day.

🎯 Goal: Build a plot using matplotlib that shows sales data for three days and place text labels on the plot using ax.text to display the sales numbers above each point.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a plot with three points representing sales on three days

Use ax.text to place text labels showing sales numbers

Position the text labels slightly above each point for clarity

Print the final plot with the text labels visible

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Adding text labels to plots helps make data easier to understand in reports and presentations.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts often annotate plots to highlight important values or trends for stakeholders.

1

Create the sales data and plot points

Create a list called days with values [1, 2, 3] representing three days. Create a list called sales with values [100, 150, 120] representing sales for each day. Then create a plot using fig, ax = plt.subplots() and plot the sales data as points using ax.plot(days, sales, 'o').

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Create days and sales lists
# Create the plot and plot the points
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use plt.subplots() to create the plot and ax.plot() to plot points.

2

Set vertical offset for text labels

Create a variable called offset and set it to 5. This will be used to position the text labels slightly above the points.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

days = [1, 2, 3]
sales = [100, 150, 120]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(days, sales, 'o')
# Create offset variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named offset and assign it the value 5.

3

Add text labels above each point

Use a for loop with variables day and sale to iterate over zip(days, sales). Inside the loop, use ax.text(day, sale + offset, str(sale)) to place the sales number as text slightly above each point.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

days = [1, 2, 3]
sales = [100, 150, 120]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(days, sales, 'o')
offset = 5
# Add text labels above each point
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use zip(days, sales) to loop over both lists together and ax.text() to add text.

4

Display the plot with text labels

Write plt.show() to display the plot with the points and text labels.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

days = [1, 2, 3]
sales = [100, 150, 120]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(days, sales, 'o')
offset = 5

for day, sale in zip(days, sales):
    ax.text(day, sale + offset, str(sale))
# Display the plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use plt.show() to display the plot window.