As we discussed in Chapter 4, Editing and Formatting with Ease in PyCharm, documentation is an essential part of programming and software development, and PyCharm offers the most powerful and straightforward features to support the task of working with documentation in Python.

In a scientific project, the Documentation panel, as we have seen, is pinned as one of the main panels of the project window. This documentation viewer displays real-time documentation data in a dynamic way. Specifically, as you move your caret to a particular method or function call in the editor, the Documentation panel will show the official documentation corresponding to that method/function.

For example, the following screenshot was taken when my cursor was at the legend() method from the Matplotlib library (line 11 of our current code):

This functionality is also applicable mid-editing: this means that as you type in part or all of a method or function, the Documentation panel will also display its corresponding documentation. Combined with an intelligent real-time code-completion feature, this Documentation panel allows PyCharm users to have comprehensive knowledge of what they are typing at a given moment.

Additionally, you can use the toolbar of the Documentation panel—specifically the Show Options Menu icon—to adjust how the output should be displayed in terms of font size or location and size of the panel. There is also an option in the Edit Source icon that allows users to jump directly to the source code of the method/function that's currently being displayed in the panel.

Next, we will examine a unique feature in PyCharm when it comes to executing Python code, that is, implementing code cells.