Ordering and Formatting Dates on X-Axis in Seaborn Bar Plot

Question

This seems so simple, but for the life of me I can\'t figure it out.

I am new to Python and Seaborn, and I am doing all this online at PythonAnywhere.

All I

Answer 1

Using your second approach, simply sort and reformat the datetime values to YYYY-MM-DD and pass values into set_xticklabels. Below demonstrates with random, seeded data:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns

# RANDOM DATA
np.random.seed(62918)
emp = pd.DataFrame({'uniqueClientExits': [np.random.randint(15) for _ in range(50)],
                    '12monthsEnding': pd.to_datetime(
                                          np.random.choice(
                                              pd.date_range('2018-01-01', periods=50), 
                                          50)
                                      )
                   }, columns = ['uniqueClientExits','12monthsEnding'])

# PLOTTING
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize = (12,6))    
fig = sns.barplot(x = "12monthsEnding", y = "uniqueClientExits", data = emp, 
                  estimator = sum, ci = None, ax=ax)

x_dates = emp['12monthsEnding'].dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d').sort_values().unique()
ax.set_xticklabels(labels=x_dates, rotation=45, ha='right')

To check graph output, run a groupby().sum():

print(emp.groupby('12monthsEnding').sum().head())

#                 uniqueClientExits
# 12monthsEnding                   
# 2018-01-01                     12
# 2018-01-02                      4
# 2018-01-04                     11
# 2018-01-06                     13
# 2018-01-08                     10
# 2018-01-11                     11
# 2018-01-14                      9
# 2018-01-15                      0
# 2018-01-16                      4
# 2018-01-17                      5
# ...