A Waterfall Chart or Bridge Chart can be a great way to visualize adjustments made to an initial value, such as the breakdown of expenses in an income statement leading to a final net income value. The initial and final values are shown as columns with the individual negative and positive adjustments depicted as floating steps.
The connecting lines between the columns make the Water chart excel template look like a bridge. It has two or more pillars. When analyzing net profit for a product starting from a sale price, where all the adjustments are negative, the chart often resembles a waterfall chart.
Waterfall Chart excel
This template contains two separate worksheets for creating either a horizontal or vertical waterfall chart. After creating your chart, you can simply copy and paste it into a presentation or report as a picture.
Summary of Features
- Allows negative values
- Includes dashed horizontal connecting lines
- Includes data labels formatted to show + and – adjustments
- Define intermediate values by placing an “x” in the Pillars column.
- Add new values by inserting rows and copying formulas down
- No macros
Using the Waterfall Chart in Another Workbook
If you want to use this chart in an income statement or some other workbook that you are using for your own private use, you can copy the entire waterfall worksheet into your other workbook and use cell references to link values in the data table to values in your statement.
Using the Waterfall Chart Template
Easy Stuff
All you need to do is edit the Labels, the Delta values, and place an “x” in the Pillars column if you want to display an intermediate value.
Inserting/Deleting Rows
To insert new rows, just right-click on a row number and select Insert Row. Then immediately press Ctrl+D to copy all the formulas from the previous row.
The first and last rows use unique formulas, do not delete those rows, and when you insert a row, insert new rows somewhere between the 2nd row and above the last.
Editing Column Widths
The pillars are created using a Column Chart series (or a Bar Chart series in the vertical chart). So, you can edit the width by adjusting the gap percentage (Format Data Series > Series Options).
The positive and negative adjustments are error bars. You change change the width by editing the line width for the Base+ and Base- error bars (Format Error Bars > Line Color and Line Style > Width).
Editing Label Positions
The data labels are displayed using invisible stacked columns. If the data labels don’t end up where you want them, you can manually change the location of each individual data label by dragging them with your mouse.
Formatting Data Labels
The data labels for the negative adjustments use a custom number format of “-#,##0;-#,##0” to force the values to show the negative sign “-” even though the actual values in the data table are positive (in the Delta- column).
