Only plotting observed dates in matplotlib, skipping range of dates - matplotlib

Question

I have a simple dataframe I am plotting in matplotlib. However, the plot is showing the range of the dates, rather than just the two observed data points.
How can I only plot the two data points and not the range of the dates?
df structure:
Date Number
2018-01-01 12:00:00 1
2018-02-01 12:00:00 2
Output of the matplotlib code:
Here is what I expected (this was done using a string and not a date on the x-axis data):
df code:
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['2018-01-01 12:00:00', 1], ['2018-02-01 12:00:00',2]], columns=['Date', 'Number'])
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])
df.set_index(['Date'],inplace=True)
Plot code:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax1 = plt.subplots(
figsize=(4,5),
dpi=72
)
width = 0.75
#starts the bar chart creation
ax1.bar(df.index, df['Number'],
width,
align='center',
color=('#666666', '#333333'),
edgecolor='#FF0000',
linewidth=2
)
ax1.set_ylim(0,3)
ax1.set_ylabel('Score')
fig.autofmt_xdate()
#Title
plt.title('Scores by group and gender')
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Answer 1

Try adding something like:
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
myFmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%y-%m-%d')
ax1.xaxis.set_major_formatter(myFmt)
plt.xticks(df.index)
I think the dates are transformed to large integers at the time of the plot. So width = 0.75 is very small, try something bigger (like width = 20:

Answer 2

Matplotlib bar plots are numeric in nature. If you want a categorical bar plot instead, you may use pandas bar plots.
df.plot.bar()
You may then want to beautify the labels a bit
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['2018-01-01 12:00:00', 1], ['2018-02-01 12:00:00',2]], columns=['Date', 'Number'])
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])
df.set_index(['Date'],inplace=True)
ax = df.plot.bar()
ax.tick_params(axis="x", rotation=0)
ax.set_xticklabels([t.get_text().split()[0] for t in ax.get_xticklabels()])
plt.show()