Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By : Elias Dabbas
Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By: Elias Dabbas

Overview of this book

Plotly's Dash framework is a life-saver for Python developers who want to develop complete data apps and interactive dashboards without JavaScript, but you'll need to have the right guide to make sure you’re getting the most of it. With the help of this book, you'll be able to explore the functionalities of Dash for visualizing data in different ways. Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash will first give you an overview of the Dash ecosystem, its main packages, and the third-party packages crucial for structuring and building different parts of your apps. You'll learn how to create a basic Dash app and add different features to it. Next, you’ll integrate controls such as dropdowns, checkboxes, sliders, date pickers, and more in the app and then link them to charts and other outputs. Depending on the data you are visualizing, you'll also add several types of charts, including scatter plots, line plots, bar charts, histograms, and maps, as well as explore the options available for customizing them. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills you need to create and deploy an interactive dashboard, handle complexities and code refactoring, and understand the process of improving your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building a Dash App
6
Section 2: Adding Functionality to Your App with Real Data
11
Section 3: Taking Your App to the Next Level

Chapter 3: Working with Plotly's Figure Objects

Imagine that you have published an article that contains a chart. Assume that your readers will, on average, spend 1 minute looking at the chart. If your chart is easy to understand, then they will probably spend 10 seconds understanding it and 50 seconds thinking, analyzing, and pondering its implications. On the other hand, if the chart is difficult to understand, they will spend 50 seconds "reading" it, and very little time thinking about its implications.

This chapter aims to equip you with tools that will help you to minimize the time an audience spends understanding your charts, and to maximize their analysis and thinking time. The two previous chapters were about structuring apps and making them interactive. In this chapter, we will discuss how to create and control the very charts around which your apps are built. Plotly's Figure object is what we will primarily explore. In this chapter, we will cover the...