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Elaborate on difference between Plotly Express and Graph Objects functions #5150

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Elaborate on difference between Plotly Express and Graph Objects func…
afeld Apr 22, 2025
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tweaking of Plotly Express vs. Graph Objects wording
afeld Apr 30, 2025
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4 changes: 3 additions & 1 deletion doc/python/graph-objects.md
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Expand Up @@ -68,7 +68,9 @@ Note that the figures produced by Plotly Express **in a single function-call** a

The figures produced by Plotly Express can always be built from the ground up using graph objects, but this approach typically takes **5-100 lines of code rather than 1**.

Here is a simple example of how to produce the same figure object from the same data, once with Plotly Express and once without. The data in this example is in "long form" but [Plotly Express also accepts data in "wide form"](/python/wide-form/) and the line-count savings from Plotly Express over graph objects are comparable. More complex figures such as [sunbursts](/python/sunburst-charts/), [parallel coordinates](/python/parallel-coordinates-plot/), [facet plots](/python/facet-plots/) or [animations](/python/animations/) require many more lines of figure-specific graph objects code, whereas switching from one representation to another with Plotly Express usually involves changing just a few characters.
Here is a simple example of how to produce the same figure object from the same data, once with Plotly Express and once without. Note that [Plotly Express functions](/python-api-reference/plotly.express.html) like [`px.bar()`](/python/bar-charts/) can accept a DataFrame as their first argument with column names passed to the `x` and `y` arguments, while [Graph Objects functions](/python-api-reference/plotly.graph_objects.html) like [`go.Bar()`](/python/bar-charts/#basic-bar-charts-with-plotlygraphobjects) require the data values to be passed directly to the `x` and `y` arguments as a tuple, list, NumPy array, or Pandas Series.

The data in this example is in "long form" but [Plotly Express also accepts data in "wide form"](/python/wide-form/) and the line-count savings from Plotly Express over graph objects are comparable. More complex figures such as [sunbursts](/python/sunburst-charts/), [parallel coordinates](/python/parallel-coordinates-plot/), [facet plots](/python/facet-plots/) or [animations](/python/animations/) require many more lines of figure-specific graph objects code, whereas switching from one representation to another with Plotly Express usually involves changing just a few characters.

```python
import pandas as pd
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