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Despite having their roots in the late 1990's, waterfall charts are beginning to see a resurgence post 2015, yet despite this, Tableau cannot natively create a waterfall. In this article, I shall walk you through building both the simplest waterfall chart, right through to the engineered chart of measures type. |
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The Simple Waterfall
Remember when we used to want to know how a single measure breaks-down across the attributes of a dimension?
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- Drag Sub-Category to Columns
Create a cumulative calculation: Running_Sum(Sum(Sales)) Drag this to Rows
- Switch the chart type to Gantt from the Marks Card
- Create a negative calculation: -Sum(Sales) and drag this to the Size on the marks card
- Add the totals: Analysis > Totals > Show Row Grand Totals
Hop over to the Show me how to build thatRecipes page - video 17 to see this.
The thing is though, what if you don't want to see the output of a single measure across the dimnesionsdimensions? A bar chart will probably suffice here.
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The basic architecture of Tableau (and indeed most visualisaton visualisation tools), is to hang a value from a partition, or rather, to show how a value is broken-down across a group of attributes as is the case of most of your charts; removing the the dimension(s), removes the chart framework, and with it, the tools' ability to build a chart. |
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By building an engineered waterfall framework
The Engineered Waterfall
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Before reading further, please ensure you have read my article on densification Lets Talk: Densification (to ensure you are using the most efficient method), even if you are already comfortable with the concept. |
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For ease, the build is demonstrated in the video below, and I do recommend you download the complete workbook to understand how to build the fully-flexible waterfall too. |
Video Tutorial: Building the Semi-Flexible Engineered Waterfall
Follow-along with this step-by-step tutorial to build the semi-flexible waterfall
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