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The default plotting engine that handles plots in Pandas is Matplotlib. I will show you how to change default plotting engine in Pandas.

Matplotlib is a very good library and it displays plots correctly in Python. However, if you want to change Matplotlib to another library, Pandas makes it very easy to change the backend.

How to change default plotting engine

Just use this command:

pd.options.plotting.backend = 'plotly'

This command will change the default engine from Matplotlib to Plotly.

An example code to generate a chart using Plotly as an engine is as below.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

my_data = np.random.normal(size=[1500, 5])
my_df = pd.DataFrame(my_data)

pd.options.plotting.backend = 'plotly'

my_plot = my_df.plot(kind='scatter')
my_plot.show()

Note that in order to use the plotly backend, you’ll need to have plotly installed in your environment.

The backends you can use are:

• matplotlib
• plotly
• hvplot
• holoviews
• bokeh
• altair

Alternative solution for a single chart

You can also use another command that will change the plotting backend for only one plot.

my_df.plot(backend='plotly')

Check plot function documentation to get to know more.