Practical Tableau

Chapter 37. How to Make a Waterfall Chart

This chapter shares how to make a waterfall chart in Tableau—a visualization that helps understand how positive and negative values of dimension members are contributing to a cumulative total. What makes waterfall charts different from a simple running total calculation is that they illustrate how each dimension member with a positive value adds to a running total and each dimension member with a negative value detracts from a running total. For this tutorial, we will build the following waterfall chart in Tableau, which visualizes how each Sub-Category in the Sample – Superstore dataset is contributing to total profit:

To start a waterfall chart in Tableau, create a vertical bar chart showing the measure, Profit, by the dimension, Sub-Category:

Next, add a table calculation to the Profit measure so that it calculates a “Running total” on Table (Across). For a refresher on table calculations, see Chapter 13. After adding the quick table calculation, the view looks like this:

As mentioned in the introduction, while at this point we see how the running total has accumulated across our different sub-categories, it is not easy to determine ...