How to Use Jupyter Notebooks

A Jupyter notebook is a document that can combine live programming code, text, images, and pretty displays of data all in the same place. This combination makes Jupyter notebooks clutch for exploring data as well as for learning and teaching.

A Jupyter notebook has a special .ipynb file extension and can only be opened if you have the application JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook installed and running. One of the cool things about Jupyter Book, which powers this online textbook, is that you can open a Jupyter notebook on the internet without any prior installation or configuration — using services like Binder.

Some of Jupyter’s Nice Features

This document is a Jupyter notebook! Let’s quickly demonstrate some of the features that make Jupyter notebooks useful.

Display Data

We can display and explore data in a readable and aesthetically-pleasing way.

For example, here’s a snippet of a CSV file with some data about films and character dialogue, compiled by The Pudding. We’ll be working with this data in a later lesson.

import pandas as pd
movie_data = pd.read_csv('../data/Pudding/Pudding-Film-Dialogue-Clean.csv')
movie_data.tail(5)

	script_id	character	words	gender	age	title	release_year	gross	proportion_of_dialogue	after_2000
23043	9254	Lumiere	1063	Man	56.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.104636	False
23044	9254	Maurice	1107	Man	71.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.108967	False
23045	9254	Monsieur D'Arqu	114	Man	58.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.011222	False
23046	9254	Mrs. Potts	564	Woman	66.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.055517	False
23047	9254	Wardrobe	121	Woman	54.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.011911	False

Make Data Visualizations

We can create visualizations based on the above data in the very same document.

Here’s a plot of The Pudding films by year of their release.

movie_data.groupby('release_year')['title'].count().plot(title='Films By Year')

<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x1191aed50>

Combine Code, Text, Images, and Links

We can combine code, text, images, and links.

For example, here’s some data about Beauty and the Beast.

movie_data[movie_data['title'] =='Beauty and the Beast']

	script_id	character	words	gender	age	title	release_year	gross	proportion_of_dialogue	after_2000
23037	9254	Beast	1162	Man	35.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.114381	False
23038	9254	Belle	2183	Woman	35.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.214883	False
23039	9254	Chip	446	Man	9.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.043902	False
23040	9254	Cogsworth	1658	Man	49.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.163205	False
23041	9254	Gaston	1326	Man	38.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.130525	False
23042	9254	Lefou	415	Man	NaN	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.040850	False
23043	9254	Lumiere	1063	Man	56.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.104636	False
23044	9254	Maurice	1107	Man	71.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.108967	False
23045	9254	Monsieur D'Arqu	114	Man	58.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.011222	False
23046	9254	Mrs. Potts	564	Woman	66.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.055517	False
23047	9254	Wardrobe	121	Woman	54.0	Beauty and the Beast	1991-01-01	452.0	0.011911	False

Now here’s an image of Beauty and the Beast characters.

See the section Code vs Markdown Cells below for more information about how to include text, images, and links in a Jupyter notebook.

How to Launch JupyterLab

To open a Jupyter notebook file (.ipynb), you need to have a Jupyter application both installed and running. This is confusing for many beginners. If you have Jupyter installed, it seems like you should just be able to click a Jupyter notebook to open it, but you need to launch the application program Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab first.

To be clear, I use Jupyter notebook with a lowercase n to refer to the document (.ipynb file) and Jupyter Notebook with a capital N to refer to the application program.

In this class, we’re using JupyterLab as our primary Jupyter application program. JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook are very similar programs, but JupyterLab is newer and has a bigger and better user interface as well as other improved features.

Anaconda Navigator

There are two main ways you can launch JupyterLab. First, you can launch JupyterLab from Anaconda Navigator. You can find Anaconda Navigator in your Applications folder or by searching your computer.

Once Anaconda Navigator opens, you can launch JupyterLab by clicking “Launch” under the JupyterLab icon.

Command Line

Second, you can launch Jupyter lab from the command line. PATH.

jupyter lab

Attention

JupyterLab will open from whatever location you launch from on the command line

Wait Why is JupyterLab Opening in My Web Browser?

JupyterLab opens in a web browser. But JupyterLab is not connected to the internet. It is simply running on a local server on your own personal computer.

How to Shut Down JupyterLab

To shut down JupyterLab, you can go to File -> Shut Down.

You can also shut down JupyterLab from the command line by pressing Control + C.

How to Make a New Jupyter Notebook

To make a new Jupyter notebook, select the Python 3 icon under “Notebook.”

How to Create and Run a Cell

• You can create a new cell by clicking the plus + sign in the toolbar or by pressing Option + Return (Mac) / Alt Return (Windows)

• You can run the cell by clicking the play button ▶️ on the toolbar above or by typing Shift + Return.

Show code cell source Hide code cell source

from IPython.display import IFrame
IFrame("../videos/create-and-run-cell.mp4", width='100%', height='400px')

Code vs Markdown Cells

Jupyter notebooks are made up of cells, which can either contain code or Markdown text. Markdown is a simple “language” that allows you to include formatting instructions directly in the text — bold, italics, headers, links, imgages, code, and more. Markdown is used all over the internet, including on Reddit and on GitHub.

Markdown Syntax	Markdown Results
To make text *italics*	To make text italics
To make text **bold***	To make text bold
To make text a [link](https://melaniewalsh.org/)	To make text a link
To make text `code`	To make text code

• You can change the cell from “Code” to “Markdown” by clicking the drop down in the toolbar.

• For more on what you can do with Markdown, see Adam Pritchard’s Markdown Cheatsheet.

How to Save Your Notebook

If you want to save your notebook, press Command ⌘ + S (Mac) / Windows Key + S (Windows).