Matplotlib: how to show legend elements horizontally?

Question

I'd like to set the legend to be displayed horizontally. I do not mean the text of the legend like described in the post Matplotlib legend vertical rotation. My actual case includes an arbitrary number of series specified with a widget. But the following example represents the gist of the challenge:

Snippet:

# Imports import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np  # data np.random.seed(123) x = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() y = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() z = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() df = pd.concat([x,y,z], axis = 1)  # plot  ax = plt.subplot() for col in (df.columns):     plt.plot(df[col]) plt.legend(loc="lower left") plt.xticks(rotation=90) plt.show() 

Plot:

The default layout seems to be vertical. Looking at the details of help(ax.legend) and the docs , there does not seem to be a straight forward way to change this to horizontal. Or is there?

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Edit - Desired Legend: (using MS Paint)

Answer 1

Specify the ncol parameter in legend. In your case something like:

plt.legend(loc="lower left", ncol=len(df.columns)) 

This is the only line I changed in your script.

Working full code:

import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np  # data np.random.seed(123) x = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() y = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() z = pd.Series(np.random.randn(100),index=pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=100)).cumsum() df = pd.concat([x,y,z], axis = 1)  # plot ax = plt.subplot() for col in (df.columns):     plt.plot(df[col]) plt.legend(loc="lower left", ncol=len(df.columns)) plt.xticks(rotation=90) plt.show()