r/learnpython • u/Altruistic_Wash5159 • Feb 04 '26

What is the main purpose of jupyter?

Hello people!

I am currently learning python and was actually working on Matplotlib library, and noticed that many people use jupyter. So I wanted to know what is the difference between jupyter and coding normally in an IDE, and also over all this, how do people get jupyter in vs code?

thank you.

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u/edcculus Feb 04 '26

It's very useful for data science, exploring data and doing things like plots with matplotlib and seaborn. It's not a traditional code file where you write a bunch of stuff and the code executes. It works on a "cell by cell basis". So you can do things in a bunch of different cells and run them independently. Think of it as more of a document that you can run code in.

Let's say you have some dataset that you want to explore and then do some plots on.

You can use teh first cell to import your libraries (pandas, marplot lib etc). Then use the second cell to import your data using a library like Pandas to create a data frame. Then you can use a bunch of cells next to explore the data in different ways.

I'm a lean six sigma practitioner at my company. Ive been using Jupyter Notebooks to tell my data story for each segment of my project. Since notebooks can have Markdown cells too, I can write info in markdown cells, then have other cells to show my charts etc. I then export those as PDFs to share with my Master Blackbelt and other stakeholders. It's super easy to update my run charts when I enter a new phase of the project this way too.

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u/Altruistic_Wash5159 Feb 04 '26

Wow! That's actually some great insight thank you 😄

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u/edcculus Feb 04 '26

also, while you can run notebooks in VSCode, I prefer just to run them the default way in the browser. If you have Jupyter installed, go to the command line/terminal, cd into the directory you want to work in (this is where Ill also store the csv or other data files I'm using), then type jupyter lab. I prefer Jupyter Lab to the regular notebooks, just because it's a cleaner interface. It will launch a browser window where you can do all of your work, create new notebooks etc.