How to Make a Waterfall Chart in Google Sheets

A waterfall chart answers one specific question better than any other chart: how did we get from this number to that number? Revenue to net profit. Opening headcount to closing headcount. Last quarter’s cash to this quarter’s. It shows the starting point, every increase and decrease stacked in sequence as floating bars, and where you landed. Finance people call it a bridge chart for exactly that reason — it bridges two totals and shows every step in between.

The good news: Google Sheets builds these natively now. No stacked-bar hacks, no helper columns, no Apps Script. If you’ve seen older tutorials that walk you through faking a waterfall with an invisible “base” series, ignore them — that method exists only because Sheets didn’t have a real waterfall type for years. It does now, and it’s a two-minute job.

If you’re not sure a waterfall is even the right chart for your data, the chart decision guide sorts that out. If you’re already sure, keep reading.

Set up your data the right way

The waterfall chart lives or dies on how you structure the data, so spend thirty seconds here and save yourself frustration later.

You need two columns: a label column and a value column. Each row is one step in the bridge.

• The first row is your starting value, entered as a positive number.
• Each middle row is a change: positive for an increase, negative for a decrease (put an actual minus sign in front — this is how Sheets knows which direction the bar floats).
• Order matters. The rows plot left to right in the order you list them, so arrange them the way the story actually unfolds.

A revenue-to-profit bridge might look like: Revenue 500, Cost of Goods -180, Operating Costs -120, Tax -40. Four rows, and the chart will show revenue at the top, three decreases stepping down, and — once you add a subtotal — profit at the bottom.

Build the chart

1. Select your two columns, headers included.
2. Go to Insert > Chart.
3. Sheets drops in a default chart, usually a column chart, and opens the Chart editor on the right.
4. Under the Setup tab, open the Chart type dropdown, scroll to the Other section near the bottom, and choose Waterfall chart.

Your bars immediately reformat: increases in one color, decreases in another, floating in sequence. That’s the whole build. The rest is polish and one genuinely important step — subtotals.

Adding a subtotal (the part people miss)

Right now your chart shows the starting value and the changes, but it doesn’t show where you ended up. A bridge with no closing total isn’t finished. You want a solid bar at the end representing the final number — the profit you bridged to.

There are two ways to handle this, and one is clearly better.

The clean way: mark a row as a subtotal. Open the Chart editor, go to Customize > Series, and you’ll find a control for designating subtotal points (in some versions it’s a “Set as subtotal” option; you specify which row indices act as subtotals). Add a final row to your data like Net Profit, and mark it as a subtotal. Sheets then draws it as a full solid bar from zero, correctly showing the accumulated result rather than treating your profit figure as one more change.

The manual way, which you’ll see in older guides, is to type the summed value in as a regular row and hope it reads correctly. It usually doesn’t float right, and it breaks the moment your numbers change. Use the subtotal setting instead. It’s what it’s there for.

Add subtotals wherever the story needs a checkpoint, not just at the end. A long bridge — revenue to gross profit to operating profit to net profit — reads far better with a solid subtotal bar at each profit line, so the eye can rest on the totals that matter.

Making it presentable

A few customizations, all under the Customize tab, take it from functional to boardroom-ready.

• Fix the colors to match meaning. The defaults (often blue up, red down) are usually fine, but if your brand or your reader’s convention differs, set increases and decreases explicitly under Series. Consistency across a report matters more than which specific colors you pick.
• Turn on connector lines. These are the thin lines linking the top of one bar to the bottom of the next. They make the “stepping down” motion obvious and are one of the few decorations that genuinely aid reading. Look for the connector-line toggle under Series or Chart style.
• Add data labels. Under Customize > Series, enable data labels so each bar shows its value. On a bridge chart specifically, labels aren’t clutter — they’re the point. People read waterfalls to see the size of each step.
• Write a real title. “How Revenue Became Profit, Q3 2026” tells the reader what they’re looking at. “Chart” does not.

The one gotcha with negatives

Waterfall charts and negative running totals don’t always play nicely — if your cumulative value dips below zero partway through the bridge and then climbs back, the floating bars can look confusing and data labels sometimes display awkwardly. This is a known rough edge, not something you did wrong. For most financial bridges (revenue down to profit, where you stay positive throughout) you’ll never hit it. If your data genuinely crosses zero mid-bridge, keep the labels on and sanity-check that each bar’s position matches the running total you’d calculate by hand.

Working in Excel instead?

If you’re in Microsoft’s world rather than Google’s, the equivalent is just as native — and if anything a little easier because Excel doesn’t try to guess a different chart type first. We’ve got the full walkthrough in how to make a waterfall chart in Excel, including the modern native method and the legacy fallback for older versions.

Faster options

Don’t want to build from scratch? Our free Google Sheets chart templates include a ready-to-use bridge you can copy to your Drive and populate. Or, if you’d rather just describe it, Google’s built-in AI can rough out a waterfall from a text prompt — we tested how well that actually works in Gemini in Google Sheets: AI chart generation tested.

FAQ

Does Google Sheets have a built-in waterfall chart? Yes. Go to Insert > Chart, open the Chart type dropdown in the Chart editor’s Setup tab, scroll to the Other section, and select Waterfall chart. You no longer need the old stacked-bar workaround.

How do I show the final total on a waterfall chart in Google Sheets? Add a final row to your data for the ending value, then in Customize > Series designate that row as a subtotal. Sheets draws it as a solid bar from zero showing the accumulated result.

How do I make bars go down in a waterfall chart? Enter decreases as negative numbers in your value column — put a minus sign in front. Sheets automatically floats and colors negative values as downward steps.

Why does my Google Sheets waterfall chart look wrong with negative numbers? If your running total crosses below zero partway through, the floating bars and labels can display awkwardly — a known limitation. For bridges that stay positive throughout, you won’t hit this. Otherwise, verify each bar against the running total manually.

What’s the difference between a waterfall chart and a bridge chart? They’re the same chart. “Bridge chart” is the finance term, because it bridges a starting total to an ending total by showing each contributing change.