This has been a guide to a waterfall chart in Excel.

Add required formats as you wish to look chart better.

Select the data and apply a stacked bar chart.

One column should have start and end values.

Apply formulas to get the accumulated balance in any one column as it should have accumulated a balance.

Gather the required data without errors.

When we send to users who have Excel versions apart from 2016, they may be unable to view the chart.

The chart will help to visualize both negative and positive values.

One can view the monthly and accumulated results in a single chart.

It is easy to create with little knowledge of Excel.

Like this, you can do a little makeover to look your waterfall chart more attractive. You can observe the thickness of the lines has changed from the previous screenshot to the current screenshot. We can also change the thickness of gridlines by selecting the gridlines option, as shown below.īy clicking on Format Gridlines, a pop-up menu will appear under that go to “Line Color,” Select “Solid Line,” and select the fill color shown in the screenshot below. Then your chart will look like the below screenshot. Select “Pattern fill” and the first pattern, as shown in the screenshot below. You can also select the pattern in the background by selecting “Format Plot Area”. You will get the menu on the right side change the gap width as per your requirements.

If you want to decrease or increase the gap between two bars or want to perform any other changes as per your project requirements, then you can do that by selecting the bars and right click then selecting “format data series”. You can consider the green color bar as “Base” hence, you can make the color “No fill” then, you will get the waterfall chart with a combination of colors.Īs described previously, add the values to the chart. Now select the data excluding the last column, “Fluctuation”, and create a chart as described in the previous process then, the chart will look like the below chart. The column” Fluctuation” represents the increase or decrease of the share price on a particular day. The column “DOWN” represents the fall in the share price. Column “UP” represents the growth in share price. The column “Price” represents the share price by the end of the day (If the share price increases, the change will add to the last date price and vice versa). 500 is the beginning price, and 545 is the ending price. Let’s take the example of the fluctuation of the share price of “ABC Ltd” for a week.Ĭolumn “Start price/End price” represents the starting and ending price of the share for the week. The values in each brick represent the monthly sales, and the brick’s position with respective values on the left axis represents the accumulated sales. If you observe, we can see both monthly sales and accumulated sales in the singles chart. Then you will get the values on the bricks for better visibility, change the brick color to light blue.ĭouble click the “chart title” and change to the waterfall chart. Select the blue bricks and right-click and select the option” Add Data Labels”. If you want to see each month’s sales in the chart, you can add the values to the bricks. If you observe the chart, it looks like water falling from up to down or “flying bricks,” which is why it is called a waterfall or flying bricks chart. Select the total bar alone and fill in some colors as your wish, then it looks like below. Now the chart will look like the below picture. So that orange bars will change to white color (colorless). Now select the orange bars and do a right-click click on the “fill” option available, select “No fill”. The blue color appears on the up, and orange appears at the bottom. Click on “Accumulation” and then click on “up arrow” as marked with red color. When you click the “Select Data”, one menu will pop up as below. Select the chart or bars and right-click you will get the pop-up menu from that menu, select the “Select data” option. Now we need to convert this stack chart to a waterfall chart with the below steps. Now select the entire data range and go to insert >charts >column >under column chart > select Stacked column as shown in the below screenshot.

Now copy the formula to all other months as shown in the below screenshot so that we will get the accumulated sales of each month. Later insert the formula for adding January sales to February sales in the accumulation row under the February column, as shown in the screenshot below.

Create an excel waterfall chart