Bar plots in Pandas - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Bar plots

📖 Scenario: You work in a small bakery. You want to see how many cakes of each type you sold last week. This will help you understand which cakes are popular.

🎯 Goal: Create a bar plot to show the number of cakes sold for each cake type.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a pandas DataFrame with cake types and their sales.

Set a variable for the plot title.

Use pandas to create a bar plot of the sales.

Display the bar plot with the correct title.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Bar plots are used in business to quickly see which products sell best or which categories have the most data.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists use bar plots to visualize and communicate data insights clearly to teams and managers.

1

Create the sales data

Create a pandas DataFrame called sales_data with two columns: 'Cake' and 'Sold'. The 'Cake' column should have these exact values: 'Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon'. The 'Sold' column should have these exact values: 50, 40, 30, 20.

Pandas

import pandas as pd
# Create the sales_data DataFrame with Cake and Sold columns
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use pd.DataFrame with a dictionary where keys are column names and values are lists of data.

2

Set the plot title

Create a variable called plot_title and set it to the string 'Cake Sales Last Week'.

Pandas

import pandas as pd
sales_data = pd.DataFrame({
    'Cake': ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon'],
    'Sold': [50, 40, 30, 20]
})
# Create the plot_title variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string to the variable plot_title.

3

Create the bar plot

Use the plot method on sales_data to create a bar plot. Use x='Cake' and y='Sold' as arguments. Save the plot object in a variable called bar_plot.

Pandas

import pandas as pd
sales_data = pd.DataFrame({
    'Cake': ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon'],
    'Sold': [50, 40, 30, 20]
})
plot_title = 'Cake Sales Last Week'
# Create the bar plot using sales_data.plot with x='Cake' and y='Sold'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sales_data.plot(x='Cake', y='Sold', kind='bar') and assign it to bar_plot.

4

Show the bar plot with title

Set the title of bar_plot to plot_title using set_title(). Then import matplotlib.pyplot as plt and call plt.show() to display the plot.

Pandas

import pandas as pd
sales_data = pd.DataFrame({
    'Cake': ['Chocolate', 'Vanilla', 'Strawberry', 'Lemon'],
    'Sold': [50, 40, 30, 20]
})
plot_title = 'Cake Sales Last Week'
bar_plot = sales_data.plot(x='Cake', y='Sold', kind='bar')
# Set the plot title and show the plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use bar_plot.set_title(plot_title) and then plt.show() to display the plot.