A simple schedule plotter

The csv/xlsx file needs to have columns "begin", "end", "days", and whatever text you want in the schedule boxes:

For this CSV you could use this command line:

plotschedule --output bar.png --title "My Schedule" example/foo.csv --labels Label1 Label2 Label3

And you'd get this output:

You can also add a color column and use matplotlib colors.

You can add a hatch column to shade individual blocks with a matplotlib hatch pattern ('///', 'xx', '..', and so on). Hatching is drawn on top of the block's fill, so it marks a block without spending the colour channel — useful when colour already means something else. Leave the cell blank for no hatch.

Changes: 0.11 now works with excel too!

Changes: 0.12 allow for times that are already converted into 'float' hours (e.g. 8:30 AM -> 8.5, etc.)

Changes: 0.14 (yeah, skip 0.13!) reorganize init.py to put the function an module scope.

Changes: 0.15 Added --sheet argument to pull a particular sheet from an excel file.

Labels are drawn in the centre of their block, so a dense hatch can end up striping the text. Pass label_bbox=True to plotSchedule to put a translucent white background behind each block's label, which keeps it readable:

plotSchedule(scheds, label_bbox=True)

The option is off by default. For full control, pass a dict instead of True and it is handed straight to matplotlib's text bbox:

plotSchedule(scheds, label_bbox={'facecolor': 'yellow', 'alpha': 0.5})

This applies to the per-block labels only, never the plot title.

From the command line, use --label-bbox to turn it on and --label-fontsize to set the text size. Unlike color and hatch, which are spreadsheet columns, these two are per-plot settings and so need flags:

plotschedule --output bar.png example/foo.csv --labels Label1 Label2 --label-bbox --label-fontsize 9

Changes: 0.17 Added per-block hatch support. Packaging moved to pyproject.toml/uv and the first tests were added.

Changes: 0.18 Added the opt-in label_bbox option for a background behind block labels, plus --label-bbox and --label-fontsize on the command line.