# Waterfall charts in style of The Economist with R

Waterfall charts are sometimes quite helpful to illustrate the various moving parts in financial data, particularly when I have positive and negative values like a profit and loss statement (P&L). However, they can be a bit of a pain to produce in Excel. Not so in R, thanks to the waterfall package by James Howard. In combination with the latticeExtra package it is nearly a one-liner to produce a good looking waterfall chart that mimics the look of The Economist:

library(latticeExtra)library(waterfall)data(rasiel) # Example data of the waterfall packagerasiel#    label          value   subtotal# 1  Net Sales       150    EBIT# 2  Expenses       -170    EBIT # 3  Interest         18    Net Income# 4  Gains            10    Net Income# 5  Taxes            -2    Net IncomeasTheEconomist(               waterfallchart(value ~ label, data=rasiel,                              groups=subtotal, main=“P&L”)               )
Of course you can create a waterfall chart also with ggplot2, the Learning R blog has a post on this topic.