Waterfall Charts in Power BI

3 min readMay 6, 2022

A Waterfall Chart is known by many names like cascade chart, flying bricks chart, bridge charts etc.

I came across Waterfall chart when I was looking for a way to present the positive and negative changes in the cost over a period of time.

Waterfall Charts are useful for understanding how an initial value (like net income) is affected by a series of positive and negative changes.

The columns are color coded so you can quickly notice increases and decreases.

You can choose Waterfall Chart When :

2. To audit the major changes contributing to the total value.

3. To plot your company’s annual profit by showing various sources of revenue in the X-axis and arrive at the total profit (or loss) in the Y-axis.

4. To visualize how much money you make and spend each month, and the running balance for your account.

Step 1 : Choose Waterfall Chart from Visualizations pane.

Step 2 : Go to Fields pane > Your Data > Choose the values Cost/Sales/profit that you want to display on the Y-axis as shown below:

Step 3: Select the time to be displayed in the X-axis, in the category section :

Step 4 : In this step I will demonstrate how sort the time in X-axis.

a) Add a rank column to your data and give order.

b) Go to Tooltips > select rank.

c) Sort axis > Sort ascending > choose rank.

Before sorting X-axis:

After sorting X-axis :

Step 5 : You can also dig more and add sub-categories in the Breakdown section to show an in-depth analysis.

Power BI uses the value in Breakdown to add additional data to the visualization.

Further you can also add the maximum breakdowns of categories as shown below:

Hope you find this helpful.

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