Pandas: bar plot xtick frequency

Question

I want to create a simple bar chart for pandas DataFrame object. However, the xtick on the chart appears to be too granular, whereas if I change the plot to line chart, xtick is optimized for better viewing. I was wondering if I can bring the same line chart xtick frequency to bar chart? Thanks.

locks.plot(kind='bar',y='SUM')

EDIT

Resultant plot:

Answer 1

You can reduce the number of thicks by setting one every n ticks, doing something like:

n = 10

ax = locks.plot(kind='bar', y='SUM')
ticks = ax.xaxis.get_ticklocs()
ticklabels = [l.get_text() for l in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()]
ax.xaxis.set_ticks(ticks[::n])
ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels(ticklabels[::n])

ax.figure.show()