A Beginner’s Guide: Applying Plotly to Create Effective Data Visualizations

Graham Waters

Department of Graduate Professional Studies, Brandeis University

If you are curious about what Plotly can do for you in your business and want to get your feet wet with learning to code some basic plotly visualizations then this is the article you are looking for. If you don’t have time to read a longer paper then I would recommend skimming down to Scenario 2 but then you may miss some useful information. The choice is yours. Plotly is a code-based plotting program that allows users to create high-level data visualizations that go beyond the capabilities of traditional platforms like Microsoft Excel. This paper will examine several different tools provided to Plotly users as well as examining what it means for visualizations to be effective. The paper highlights two data sets that represent two scenarios that could benefit from data visualization. The first relates to noise complaints received by the New York Police Department in the year 2015 and the second is a study from the United Nations of the Happiness of Countries. Several tools will be used to visualize various aspects of these data for analysis.

Keywords: Plotly, Effective Data Viz, Data Visualization, Python

Note: I did write much of the Python code included in this…