I find waterfall charts to be useful when you are interested in visualizing a starting quantity, positive and negative changes to that quantity, and the resulting ending quantity. I like waterfall charts, so I thought it might be useful to do a post focusing on them: what they are, an example use case, and how to use what I like to consider "brute-force-excel" to create them.

One common piece of feedback I get after presenting on the topic of data visualization goes something like this:  Wow, that was super useful. I'm never going to use pie charts again. But when it comes to the graphs, how do you actually make them look like that? I'm not Excel-savvy...help! Let me take a few minutes to walk step-by-step through an example to expose those who question their Excel expertise to some of my tricks.