Waterfall charts in Google Slides

What is a waterfall chart?

A waterfall chart — the variance bridge consultants live in — shows how a starting value moves to an ending value through a sequence of positive and negative steps. It's the standard way to explain a profit bridge, a price/volume/mix walk, or a cash movement. Google Slides has no native waterfall: the built-in chart tool only offers bar, column, line and pie, so most people build it in Excel and paste a screenshot that goes stale the moment a number moves.

When to use it

• Explaining what moved a total: revenue, EBIT, cash or headcount from one period to the next.
• Price / volume / mix bridges in a management or board deck.
• Any 'from X to Y, here's why' story where the steps matter more than the levels.

How to make a waterfall chart in Google Slides

1. Skip the native tool — it has no waterfall
   Insert → Chart in Google Slides gives you bar, column, line and pie only. There is no waterfall, no connectors, no floating segments. This is the wall everyone hits.
2. Add ChartKit and insert a waterfall
   With the ChartKit extension installed, open the chart menu on the slide and pick Waterfall. You get a real bridge — start and end totals, floating step bars, and dashed connectors — as a native, editable object.
3. Type your steps and label them
   Enter each step as a value; mark the totals. ChartKit draws the connectors and the running total for you, with data labels and deltas on by default.
4. Style it board-ready and keep it live
   Colours default to your palette; totals, deltas and an axis break are one click. Edit it on the slide any time — no round-trip to a hidden Sheet, no re-pasted image.

Common questions

Related chart types