Saving charts

Once a chart is ready, we can store it on the hard drive so it can be referenced in other documents. In this recipe, we'll see how to save charts in different formats.

Getting ready

We need to install matplotlib in our virtual environment:

$ echo "matplotlib==3.2.1" >> requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are using macOS, you may get an error like this: RuntimeError: Python is not installed as a framework. See the matplotlib documentation on how to fix it: https://matplotlib.org/faq/osx_framework.html.

How to do it...

1. Import matplotlib:

   >>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   

2. Prepare the data to be displayed on the graph and split it into different arrays:

   >>> DATA = (
   ...    ('Q1 2017', 100),
   ...    ('Q2 2017', 150),
   ...    ('Q3 2017', 125),
   ...    ('Q4 2017', 175),
   ... )
   >>> POS = list(range(len...