The .sort_values() method

Let's say you wanted to look at the top 10 theater/movie combinations in your data. Maybe you want to build another theater in your best-performing city, or see if a smash hit movie was generating impressive ticket sales in all of your theater locations. A start to this process might be to sort your data by ticket sales and look at the top few rows.

That's one place where sort_values() comes in handy. Let's use it to answer the question what are our top 3 movie/theater combinations?

This exercise is part of the course

Python for Spreadsheet Users

View Course

Exercise instructions

Use the .sort_values() method to sort sales by ticket_quantity, and set the ascending argument in .sort_values() to False so the highest-selling movies are first.
Display the top 3 best-selling movies using the .head() method.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Import the pandas package as pd
import pandas as pd

# Read in the Excel file
sales = pd.read_excel('ticket_sales.xlsx')

# Sort sales by ticket quantity descending
sales_sorted = sales.____(____, ascending=____)
sales_sorted = sales_sorted.reset_index(drop=True)

# Print top 3 rows of sorted data
print(sales_sorted.____(____))

Edit and Run Code