Waterfall Chart

A waterfall chart shows a running value as quantities are added or subtracted. It’s helpful to visualize how an underlying value is influenced by a series of positive and negative changes. The columns are usually encoded using color so that you can quickly identify increments and decrements.

In a waterfall chart, a particular bar is positioned at the end of the previous bar and the baseline is based on whether there is an increase or decrease in the previous value.

These are also called Bridge charts showing the running total of a set of added and subtracted values. The waterfall charts have color-coded columns to represent the increase or decrease of values in an easy manner. It shows how an initial value is affected by changes in the chart denoted by a column or vertical bar. The intermediate values can fluctuate between initial and final values.

When to use Waterfall Charts

  • To show changes in data across time or some different categories.
  • To show major incremental or decremental changes that contribute to a total value.
  • To analyze data based on profit or loss scenarios like the annual profit of a company.
  • To represent the beginning and end of some count scenarios.
  • When we want to analyze actual values and targeted ones over time.

Common Examples:

  • Monthly spending or Savings of a household.
  • Annual Profit or Total Revenue generated in a company.

Note: The same steps are to be taken as shown earlier in the “Bubble chart” section for opening the Power BI desktop and navigating the data source before loading it.

When the “Visualizations” pane is opened, use the following icon for implementing the waterfall chart into the Power BI canvas.

Initial Canvas:

DataSet used: We will be working with “techPublishedDataSet” data with data fields as shown in the image. The major variables used to show the charts are as follows.

  • Month: This is the data field used in the x-axis for showing the months of a year.
  • Article_variance: This is the parameter used for showing the y-axis. Article_variance is the new column created that shows the value of (Total_Published – Expected) articles.

Dataview in Power BI desktop: ‘Sheet1’ is the sheet of the “techPublishedDataSet.xlsx” file.

Set the Visualization Pane: “Sum of Article_variance” is taken in the y-axis as we are taking the summation of total published articles including all different technologies in any given month.

Output:

On hovering on any column:



Power BI – Bubble Chart and Waterfall chart

In this article, we will learn to implement basic bubble charts and waterfall charts using Power BI. This discusses some important concepts used to create the very common bar and column charts so as to make large business intelligence decisions. We will be discussing the following topics and their implementation in the Power BI desktop.

Pre-requisite: You can refer to Power BI interactive dashboards for easy implementation of the following charts.

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Waterfall Chart

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