Adjust labels for monthly bar plot

Question

I have a Series monthCount:

And I want to plot it as bar plot. This works using monthCount.plot.bar():

However, I would prefer different labels for the bars. "January 2022", "February 2022" and so on would be much better. Even the year could be dropped and put as caption above. How do I change the labels in that way for the bars?

Something like `import matplotlib.dates as mdates; ax = monthCount.plot.bar(); ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("%B %Y"))`. Let me know if it doesn't work. — Corralien, Jun 22 '23 at 08:31
Pandas doesn't seem to handle the date well. I reopened the question. — Corralien, Jun 22 '23 at 09:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '23 at 09:18

You can define your own labels and set the rotation:

ax = monthCount.plot.bar()

labels = monthCount.index.strftime('%B %Y')
ax.set_xticklabels(labels, rotation=45, ha='right', rotation_mode='anchor')
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Output:

Minimal Reproducible Example:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

data = {pd.Timestamp('2022-01-01 00:00:00'): 31,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-02-01 00:00:00'): 28,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-03-01 00:00:00'): 31,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-04-01 00:00:00'): 28,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-05-01 00:00:00'): 6,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-06-01 00:00:00'): 0,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-07-01 00:00:00'): 0,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-08-01 00:00:00'): 0,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-09-01 00:00:00'): 15,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-10-01 00:00:00'): 19,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-11-01 00:00:00'): 30,
        pd.Timestamp('2022-12-01 00:00:00'): 31}
monthCount = pd.Series(data).rename_axis('date')

Adjust labels for monthly bar plot

1 Answers1