Better Plots

Data4All

Author

Ted Laderas

Published

October 31, 2025

Better Plots

Where are the Workshop Materials?

Materials

Reminder

This workshop adheres to the DaSL Learning Community Participation Guidelines:

Participation Guidelines

Please be respectful of your fellow learners and help each other learn.

Remember, it’s dangerous to learn alone! So partner up with someone, it’s fun to learn together.

Instructors

  • Ted Laderas, Director of Training & Community, Office of Chief Data Officer
  • Chris Lo, Data Science Trainer, Office of Chief Data Officer

Introduce Yourself

In chat, please introduce yourself:

  • Your Name
  • Your position / group
  • One thing that you think makes plots hard to interpret (font, too many colors, etc.)

How This Workshop Works

There are two separate tabs for each demo - an R one and a Python one. Pick your path. Both of them are loaded into the web browser, so feel free to switch between them to try out different approaches.

  • For R users, we will be using the ggplot2 package
  • For Python Users, we will be using the seaborn package.

The play button on the right of a code window lets you execute that code.

Note that there are two levels of setting options for Python code: the seaborn level and the matplotlib level, because seaborn is an extension of matplotlib. seaborn options look like this:

my_plot.set_xlabel("Python Rules")

Versus the matplotlib level, which looks like this:

plt.show()

Because this is not JupyterLab, note that we always have to end our statements with plt.show() to show the plot.

Overview of Data

We’re going to be using a TV Show dataset. Try running the code below for your language of interest.

Data in Sharepoint