R: Add values to waterfall chart

Question

I am using the waterfall package in R to prepare waterfall charts and like to add the values to the chart.

Example code (taken from http://lamages.blogspot.de/2012/05/waterfall-charts-in-style-of-economist.html):

library(latticeExtra)
library(waterfall)
data(rasiel) # Example data of the waterfall package
rasiel
#    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 Income

asTheEconomist(
               waterfallchart(value~label, data=rasiel,
                              groups=subtotal, main="P&L")
               )

Results in this plot:

I am looking for the correct code to get something like this:

Answer 1

waterfallchart simply uses the lattice package with specific settings to create this type of plot. Consequently, all of the lattice functions that modify plots will work inside of waterfallchart.

You have to set the text parameters of the panel like so:

asTheEconomist(
  waterfallchart(value~label, data=rasiel,
                      groups=subtotal, main="P&L",
                 panel=function(x, y, ...) {
                   panel.waterfallchart(x, y, ...);
                   ltext(x=seq(1,7,1),y=c(75,75,10,1,20,15,14),
                         labels=c("+150","-170","-20","+10","+18","-2","+6"),
                         srt=90,font=2,cex=1.5)
                 }
       )
)

Answer 2

The short answer is no, this is not possible. When I wrote the code for waterfallplot and waterfallchart, I explicitly tried to mimic the behavior of barplot and barchart, respectively. At the time, and this was some years ago, neither had an option to support this and I don't think that's changed.

I think more progress would be made by reimplementing waterfall plots in ggplot2, and it should make this and other plot tweaks relatively easy.