Waterfall Charts in R

How to make waterfall charts in R with Plotly.

New to Plotly?

Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for R. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Basic Waterfall Chart

library(plotly)

x= list("Sales", "Consulting", "Net revenue", "Purchases", "Other expenses", "Profit before tax")
measure= c("relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "relative", "total")
text= c("+60", "+80", "", "-40", "-20", "Total")
y= c(60, 80, 0, -40, -20, 0)
data = data.frame(x=factor(x,levels=x),measure,text,y)

fig <- plot_ly(
  data, name = "20", type = "waterfall", measure = ~measure,
  x = ~x, textposition = "outside", y= ~y, text =~text,
  connector = list(line = list(color= "rgb(63, 63, 63)"))) 
fig <- fig %>%
  layout(title = "Profit and loss statement 2018",
        xaxis = list(title = ""),
        yaxis = list(title = ""),
        autosize = TRUE,
        showlegend = TRUE)

fig

Setting Marker Size and Color

This example uses decreasing, increasing, and total attributes to customize the bars.

library(plotly)

y = c(375, 128, 78, 0, -327, -78, 0, 32, 89, 0, -45, 0)
x = c("Sales", "Consulting", "Maintenance", "Net revenue", "Purchases", "Material expenses", "Operating profit", "Investment income", "Financial income",
"Profit before tax", "Income tax (15%)", "Profit after tax")
measure = c("relative", "relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "total")
data = data.frame(x=factor(x,levels = x), y, measure)

fig <- plot_ly(data, x = ~x, y = ~y, measure = ~measure, type = "waterfall", base = 300, decreasing = list(marker = list(color = "Maroon", line = list(color = "red", width = 2))),
increasing = (marker = list(color = "Teal")),
totals = list(marker = list(color = "deep sky blue", line = list(color = 'blue', width = 3))))
fig <- fig %>%
layout(title = "Profit and loss statement", xaxis = list(title = "", tickfont = "16", ticks = "outside"),
yaxis = list(title = ""), waterfallgap = "0.3")


fig

library(plotly)

x = c(375, 128, 78, 27, 0, -327, -12, -78, -12, 0, 32, 89, 0, -45, 0)
y = c("Sales", "Consulting", "Maintenance", "Other revenue", "Net revenue", "Purchases", "Material expenses",
"Personnel expenses", "Other expenses", "Operating profit", "Investment income", "Financial income",
"Profit before tax", "Income tax (15%)", "Profit after tax")
measure = c("relative", "relative", "relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "relative", "relative",
"relative", "total", "relative", "relative", "total", "relative", "total")
data = data.frame(x,y=factor(y,levels = y), measure)

fig <- plot_ly(data, x = ~x, y = ~y, measure = ~measure, type = "waterfall", name = "2018",
orientation = "h", connector = list(mode = "between", line = list(width = 4, color = "rgb(0, 0, 0)", dash = 0)))
fig <- fig %>%
layout(title = "Profit and loss statement 2018<br>waterfall chart displaying positive and negative",
xaxis = list(title = "", tickfont = "16", ticks = "outside"),
yaxis = list(title = "", type = "category", autorange = "reversed"),
        xaxis = list(title ="", type = "linear"),
        margin = c(l = 150),
        showlegend = TRUE)


fig

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)