How to Make a Sankey Diagram in Excel (Yes, It’s Possible)

Let’s start with the truth most tutorials bury in paragraph nine: Excel has no native Sankey chart type. Not in Excel 365, not in Excel 2024, not hidden behind an Insert menu you haven’t found yet. Every “Sankey in Excel” you’ve seen was made one of three ways: a stacked-bar approximation built by hand, a third-party add-in, or a free external tool with the result pasted back into Excel.

All three are legitimate. This guide covers all three, in order of effort, and tells you plainly which one to pick for your situation. If you’re deciding whether a Sankey is even the right chart for your data, start with our guide to which chart you should use — Sankeys are spectacular for flows and wrong for almost everything else.

What a Sankey Diagram Actually Shows

A Sankey diagram visualizes flow between stages: where quantities start, where they end up, and how much travels along each path. The width of each ribbon is proportional to the amount flowing through it. Classic uses:

Budget allocation — revenue sources on the left, spending categories on the right
Marketing funnels — traffic sources flowing into conversions and drop-offs
Energy or materials — inputs flowing to outputs and losses
Headcount movement — departments people transfer between

If your data isn’t a flow — if it’s just categories with values — a Sankey is the wrong tool and a bar chart will serve your reader better. Sankeys earn their complexity only when the movement between stages is the story.

The Verdict Up Front

Here’s the decision, so you don’t have to read 2,000 words to get it:

Your situation	Best option
One-off diagram for a deck, simple two-stage flow	Option 1: stacked-bar build (below)
The chart must live inside a workbook and update with data	Option 1, accepting its limits
Multi-stage flow (3+ levels), or you need it to look genuinely good	Option 3: free external tool
You make Sankeys regularly and your IT allows add-ins	Option 2: an Office add-in

Now the details.

Option 1: The Native Stacked-Bar Build (No Add-Ins)

This is the least-painful way to approximate a Sankey using nothing but Excel’s built-in charts. Be clear-eyed about what you get: a two-stage flow diagram with straight ribbons, not the elegant curved multi-level Sankeys you’ve seen in annual reports. For a budget breakdown or a simple source-to-destination flow, it’s genuinely presentable.

Step 1: Structure your data

Lay out your flows as a simple three-column table and convert it to an Excel Table (Ctrl+T):

HomeInsertPage LayoutFormulas

420000

Source	Destination	Amount
Product revenue	Salaries	420,000
Product revenue	Marketing	180,000
Services revenue	Salaries	150,000
Services revenue	Operations	90,000

Using a Table matters: when the numbers change, the chart follows. (If it doesn’t, see our fix guide for Excel charts that won’t update.)

Step 2: Build the left and right columns

Create two summary ranges with dynamic array formulas — this is where the modern method beats the old copy-paste tutorials:

Left column (sources): =GROUPBY(Table1[Source], Table1[Amount], SUM) — or on older 365 builds, =UNIQUE(Table1[Source]) alongside =SUMIF(Table1[Source], E2#, Table1[Amount])
Right column (destinations): the same pattern against the Destination column

You now have the totals for each end of the flow, and they recalculate automatically.

Step 3: Insert the stacked bars

Select the source summary range and insert a Stacked Column Chart (Insert > Charts > 2-D Column > Stacked Column).
Right-click the chart > Select Data > Add the destination summary as a second category, so you have two stacked columns side by side: sources on the left, destinations on the right.
Right-click any bar > Format Data Series > set Gap Width to around 300% so the two columns sit far apart with room for ribbons between them.

Step 4: Draw the flow ribbons

This is the hacky part, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it: Excel won’t draw proportional ribbons for you. The workable approach:

Insert > Shapes > Freeform (or a Parallelogram for straight flows).
Draw a shape connecting each source segment to its destination segment. Match the shape’s height at each end to the segment heights.
Set each shape’s fill to the source segment’s color at 40–50% transparency so overlaps stay readable.
Select all shapes plus the chart and Group them (Ctrl+G) so the diagram moves as one object.

Step 5: Label and finish

Add data labels to the bar segments (Chart Elements > Data Labels), delete the legend, axis, and gridlines — a Sankey needs none of them — and title the chart with the takeaway (“Where the 2026 budget actually went”), not a description (“Budget Sankey diagram”).

The honest limitation: those ribbons are drawings, not chart elements. When your data changes, the bars update but the shapes don’t. For a quarterly report you rebuild anyway, that’s acceptable. For a live dashboard, it isn’t — which is why the next two options exist.

Option 2: Office Add-Ins

Several add-ins in the Microsoft AppSource marketplace generate real Sankey diagrams inside Excel — ChartExpo, Power-user, and SankeyEngine are among the names you’ll encounter, with varying free tiers and paywalls. The workflow is genuinely easier: structure your data in columns, click the add-in’s button, get a proper Sankey.

The trade-offs are real, though. Many corporate IT policies block add-in installation. Free tiers typically watermark output or cap complexity. And your chart now depends on a third-party subscription continuing to exist. If you build Sankeys monthly, an add-in earns its place; if you build one a year, it doesn’t. We assess the current add-in and free-tool landscape properly in our roundup of the best free charting tools for small businesses.

Option 3: Free External Tools (Often the Right Answer)

Here’s the position most Excel sites won’t take because it sends you away from Excel: for a multi-stage Sankey, a free web tool beats Excel every time. Tools like SankeyMATIC (free, no signup) take a simple text format — Source [Amount] Destination — and render a genuine, proportional, curved Sankey in seconds. You paste your Excel data in, export a PNG or SVG, and drop it into your report next to the workbook.

You give up live linkage to your data. You gain a diagram that actually looks like a Sankey, handles three or more stages without shape surgery, and takes five minutes instead of forty. For anything destined for a slide deck or PDF, this is our recommendation.

Can Copilot Build a Sankey in Excel?

Short answer: not natively, because Copilot can only insert chart types Excel actually has. However, Copilot’s ability to generate Python charts in Excel changes the picture — Python’s plotting libraries can render genuine Sankeys inside a worksheet, and prompting Copilot to do it is now a realistic path for 365 users on plans that include it. We cover the prompting patterns and the limits in our complete guide to creating charts with Copilot in Excel.

FAQ

Does Excel have a built-in Sankey chart? No. No current version of Excel includes a native Sankey type. You need the stacked-bar approximation, an add-in, Python in Excel, or an external tool.

What data format does a Sankey need? Three columns: source, destination, and amount. Each row is one flow. Multi-stage Sankeys chain these (stage 1 → stage 2, stage 2 → stage 3).

Is a Sankey the same as an alluvial diagram? They’re close cousins. Alluvial diagrams track categorical membership across stages; Sankeys emphasize quantity flowing through a system. For business budget-and-funnel work, the distinction rarely matters.

How many flows is too many? Past roughly 12–15 ribbons, Sankeys collapse into spaghetti. If yours is unreadable, aggregate small flows into an “Other” category — or reconsider whether a table serves the reader better.