How to Make a Waterfall Chart in Google Sheets with AI

A waterfall chart is one of the best ways to tell a story about how a starting value changes over time. Whether you’re tracking monthly revenue, project budgets, or website traffic, it quickly shows the positive and negative contributions that lead to a final result. This article will walk you through how to prepare your data and build a waterfall chart in Google Sheets, including a much faster method using AI.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

What Exactly is a Waterfall Chart?

Think of a waterfall chart (sometimes called a bridge chart) as a visual representation of a running ledger. It starts with an initial value on the left, and then a series of "floating" bars show the sequential positive and negative changes, leading to a final value on the right. This format makes it incredibly easy to see exactly which factors had the most significant impact on the final outcome.

Common use cases include:

• Financial Analysis: Visualizing a profit and loss statement, showing how starting revenue is affected by costs to arrive at net profit.
• Cash Flow Tracking: Illustrating how a starting bank balance changes due to income and expenses over a month or quarter.
• Budget Variance: Showing how a project’s budget is impacted by various overspends and underspends.
• Sales Pipeline: Tracking how the number of leads in a sales funnel changes from one stage to the next.

Essentially, any time you need to explain how you got from Point A to Point B, a waterfall chart is an excellent tool.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

How to Prepare Your Data in Google Sheets

This is the most crucial - and often trickiest - part of the process. Google Sheets doesn't have a dedicated "Waterfall Chart" type, so we need to cleverly adapt a stacked column chart. To do this, we must first structure our data with a few helper columns.

Let's use a simple example: tracking the monthly cash flow for a small coffee shop.

Step 1: Start with Your Raw Data

Begin with two simple columns: one for the Category of the change and one for the Amount. Positive numbers represent cash in (increases), and negative numbers represent cash out (decreases).

Your raw data might look like this:

Step 2: Create Helper Columns

To make the stacked column chart work, we need to add four helper columns: Base (Hidden), Positive Change, Negative Change, and Start/End Total.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Step 3: Add the Formulas

Now, let's populate these new columns with formulas that will automatically calculate the values needed for our chart.

Column F - Start/End Total:

This column will only contain the numbers for our first and last bars - everything else will be blank. In cell F2, enter the starting total manually.

=C2

In cell F8 (our ending row), create a formula to sum everything up:

=SUM(F2:E7)

Column D - Positive Change:

This column isolates only the positive numbers from your "Amount" column, ignoring the start/end totals.

In cell D2, enter this formula and drag it down to the second-to-last row (D7):

=IF(C2>0, C2, 0)

Column E - Negative Change:

This column works similarly but for negative numbers. We use the ABS() function to make the number positive, as the chart only needs the bar's height. The color will tell us it's a decrease.

In cell E2, enter this formula and drag it down to E7:

=IF(C2<0, ABS(C2), 0)

Column B - Base (Hidden):

This is the magic column. It calculates the "invisible" base bar that each floating bar will sit on top of. It figures out the bottom of each bar based on the previous bar's value.

Leave cell B2 blank. In cell B3, enter this formula and drag it down to B8:

=B2+D2-E3

Building the Waterfall Chart (The Manual Way)

With your data perfectly prepared, creating the chart is now the easy part.

Step 1: Select Your Data and Insert a Chart

Highlight your entire data range, from cell A1 to F8. Then go to Insert > Chart.

Step 2: Choose the Stacked Column Chart

Google Sheets will likely guess the wrong chart type. In the Chart editor, go to the "Setup" tab and change the Chart type to a Stacked column chart.

Step 3: Customize the Chart Series

This is where we make the chart look like a waterfall. Go to the "Customize" tab in the Chart editor and open the "Series" section.

1. Hide the Base Series: Select the "Base (Hidden)" series from the dropdown. Change its Fill color to "None." This makes the support bars invisible.
2. Color the Changes: Select the "Positive Change" series and color it green. Then select the "Negative Change" series and color it red.
3. Color the Totals: Finally, select the "Start/End Total" series and choose a neutral color like blue or gray.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

The Faster Way: Using an AI Add-on for Google Sheets

The manual method works perfectly, but it's time-consuming and prone to errors. Fortunately, AI offers a much faster path.

AI tools designed for spreadsheets can automate the entire process. Instead of building helper columns and setting up charts manually, you simply ask the AI in plain English for what you want.

While specific steps vary between tools, the general process is remarkably simple:

1. Start with Basic Data: You only need your initial two columns (e.g., "Category" and "Amount"). No helper columns are needed.
2. Install an AI Add-on: Find and install an AI analysis or chart-building tool from the Google Workspace Marketplace.
3. Write a Prompt: Open the add-on and describe the chart you want. For our example, a prompt might be: "Create a waterfall chart from my data in cells A1 to B7. Show how the starting cash changes based on sales and expenses to result in the ending cash."
4. Let the AI Work: The AI will process your request, generate all the necessary helper columns on a new sheet, and insert a perfectly configured waterfall chart in seconds.

The primary advantage here is speed and accessibility. You no longer need to be a spreadsheet expert to create sophisticated visualizations. Anyone on your team can describe what they need and let the AI handle the complex mechanics.

Final Thoughts

Waterfall charts are compelling for visualizing financial and operational data, detailing the story of how you got from one number to another. While creating them manually in Google Sheets is certainly achievable through careful data setup and chart configuration, this process is often complex and time-consuming.

With Graphed, we automate these processes, allowing you to focus on strategy instead of spreadsheets.