How to Do a Waterfall Graph in Excel

What this does

A waterfall chart bridges a starting figure to an ending figure by showing each contribution as a floating column: increases rise from where the previous one stopped, decreases fall, and the totals you nominate are anchored to the axis. Excel 2016 and later have it as a native type, so the old trick of stacking an invisible series is no longer necessary. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. The difference between a quick fix and a sheet you can trust is the extra minute you spend validating “do a waterfall graph in excel”. Start on a copy or a tiny sample, keep the affected chart visible, and compare the result with the tool above before you touch the real workbook. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. The point is a visual that makes the number obvious at a glance, but the practical win is that someone else can open the file and understand what happened without asking you.

A worked example

Opening headcount 120, +35 hires, -18 leavers, +12 transfers, closing 149. Select the five labels and values, Insert ▸ Waterfall. Then double-click the Opening column and tick Set as total, and do the same for Closing — otherwise both float in mid-air as though they were changes rather than positions. A bridge chart is how a change in a total gets explained rather than merely reported, and it is the one chart type a finance audience reads without a caption. If this is something you do often, add the command to the Quick Access Toolbar (right-click it on the ribbon and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar) or learn its shortcut, so next time it is one click instead of a hunt through the menus.

In Google Sheets

This is a command rather than a formula, so there is no syntax to carry over. Google Sheets arranges its commands in menus across the top instead of a ribbon, names some of them differently and does not have every Excel command — look for the equivalent in the Sheets menus or its help before assuming the steps match. Keep this page bookmarked for the next time the same question comes up. Better still, repeat the steps once in your own workbook — doing it yourself is what turns a copied answer into something you remember. Here is the takeaway for “do a waterfall graph in excel”: follow the steps at the top, check the result on the sheet itself, and keep undo in mind while you experiment. Done once deliberately, it becomes something you do from memory in Excel rather than something you search for again.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting Set as total, which leaves the opening and closing bars floating and makes the chart unreadable.
• Entering decreases as positive numbers, so every movement rises.
• Reordering the rows after building the chart — a waterfall is a narrative and its sequence is part of the meaning.
• Expecting the native type in Excel 2013 or earlier, which needs the manual invisible-series build instead.

Frequently asked questions