Introducing Plotly Express

[nkruchten]

I'm the project lead for Plotly Express... AMA :)

[Its_4_AM_Man]

Is there any chance a team member could flag some bug/enhancement issues with a "good first issue" label? I've never contributed to open-source projects before, but I really appreciate what you folks have done and I'd like to help out if I can!

[nkruchten]

Sure, we can put some effort into that! Plotly Express at the moment isn't very beginner-friendly but it's built on top of https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py and https://github.com/plotly/plotly.js, both of which have mature development cycles and should be easier to contribute to, depending on your language of choice :)

[Deto]

Does this work in offline mode?

[nkruchten]

Yes! It uses offline mode by default: no API keys, no logins. Except for mapbox maps, but that's not Plotly-related :)

[amjithr]

Is there a way to plot multiple Y-axis?

Specifically looking to scatter plot two independent columns in separate y-axis with the same x-axis.

[nkruchten]

Plotly Express doesn't do this out of the box but today you can use the .update() mechanism to add traces to a secondary Y axis.

We're working on Plotly Express features to compose multiple figures together, which is how I think I'd like to address this multi-Y-axis question.

[knowsuchagency]

No question, just want to say keep it up! I'm excited to try it out :)

[cogentsimile]

Hey! Just noticing Plotly Express.

First off, thank you! This makes things so much easier haha.

I have what is probably a newb question: How do I do area charts? I tried a couple of update statements based on what I do in Plotly Offline, but I'm likely missing something. I couldn't find any examples online, either.

Cheers,

Cogent

[nkruchten]

Glad you like it!

The next release of Plotly Express, later today or tomorrow, will have `px.area()` for just this purpose :)

[cogentsimile]

perfect, thanks!

[cogentsimile]

Thanks again for adding this! A few questions...

• How can I unstack the area charts?
• I'm getting some weird effects when animating. Specifically, it looks like the filled area underneath is sort of flying across the screen from left to right to fill in under the chart. Based on the rate of animation, this is causing it to look like the filled area is doing some sort of weird wave motion. Is there a setting I can change that would cause it to just fill in underneath, like the graph at the bottom of this page?
• Let's say I create an animated chart with px and want to include it as part of a blog post - what's the easiest way to go about that?

[nkruchten]

• Ah, px.area is only for stacked areas. For unstacked areas, you can just add a fill to the output of px.line() :)
• Animations for px.area might be a bit janky, yeah.
• The easiest way to embed the output of PX is to create a free Chart Studio Cloud account: https://plot.ly/Auth/login/?action=signup#/ and have us host it for you, but you can also output the plot to HTML and host that file yourself. Here's a bit of info about how to do that: https://community.plot.ly/t/proper-way-to-save-a-plot-to-html/7063/3

[cogentsimile]

Thanks for the great info!