Customizing your waterfall chart

After you uploaded your data, you’re provided with a number of options to improve the clarity, look, and effectiveness of your waterfall chart. In this guide, we'll walk you through customizing and publishing the following chart, outlining each setting as we go.

Contents

1. Refine: Waterfall data
2. Refine: Horizontal axis
3. Refine: Vertical axis
4. Refine: Columns
5. Refine: Labels
6. Refine: Tooltips
7. Refine: Sorting
8. Refine: Appearance
9. Annotate
10. Annotate: Text annotations
11. Annotate: Highlight range
12. Layout & Publish

In Step 3: Visualize, you'll notice three tabs besides Chart type: Refine, Annotate, and Layout. Let's start with what's in the Refine tab.

Refine: Waterfall data

On the very top of the Refine tab, you can set which column of data in your dataset is visualized and also what format that data is in.

• Select column: Select the data column that contains numeric values to be shown in the waterfall chart. If you only uploaded one text or date column – like we did – you see this field grayed out. Datawrapper automatically selects that one text or date column.
• Data format: Let Datawrapper know what your number column contains:
  • Differences, meaning your data consists of value changes between rows ("1000, +3000, -2000, -1000," etc.). This is the default.
  • Running totals, meaning your data consists of absolute/total values ("1000, 4000, 2000, 1000," etc.). In this case, Datawrapper will calculate the differences between your values. Our dataset consists of running totals, so selecting that as our data format will make the chart look like what we're expecting.

Refine: Horizontal axis

This section lets you change the style of your x-axis.

• Grid: By default, no grid lines are shown. You can decide to show them, or to only show ticks above the grid labels.
• Rotate labels: This setting allows you to rotate the labels of your columns if some of the labels are too long to fit in a horizontal fashion. Here you have the choices of Auto, Always and Never. If set to Auto, labels will only rotate if there isn’t enough space for them to be displayed horizontally (e.g. on narrow screens). Whatever you choose, make sure to check the mobile view of your waterfall chart.

Refine: Vertical axis

You can modify the following on your y-axis:

• Custom range: By default, the vertical axis spans from the lowest to the highest value – although Datawrapper might extend the chart to the zero baseline if it's close. Using the custom range option, you can extend or cut off the y axis at the top or bottom. Note that setting a range that cuts off data will be ignored.

• Custom ticks: By default, Datawrapper tries to find a good-looking number of gridlines it then labels. You can change that by adding your own values, separated by a comma. Note that values will only be shown if they don’t overlap and fall within the custom range.

• Number format: Choose how your numbers should appear (e.g. 200,000 or 200K or 200,000.0%). Learn about the available options in this Academy article. For our chart, we choose the 123.4k format to shorten the long numbers.

• Grid: Selecting the Lines option will show grid lines at every column, while Ticks only shows a short tick mark. You can also not show them at all by selecting Off.

• Grid labels: You can decide to display your grid labels outside (= to the left, in left-to-right charts) or inside of the chart body. Further down, you can also choose between showing your labels on the right or on the left. Alternatively, you can also choose to hide them entirely.

At the bottom of the Vertical axis settings, you'll find the option to Zoom to differences. This will only be available when the distance from the minimum value in your data to zero is greater than the distance from the minimum value to the maximum value in your data. That's not the case for our data (our minimum value is 7.5BN and our maximum value is 16.4BN), so this setting is grayed out.

If you turn on Zoom to differences, Datawrapper crops the vertical axis range to show the differences at full height, and show the start and end column as either a point or a column with a gradient. Here's another chart to demonstrate this effect:

Refine: Columns

This section lets you change the color and width of your columns, and decide on what information to show.

• Colors: You can control the color of increases, decreases and (sub)totals. By default, we show a colorblind-friendly green and red.
• Connecting lines: By default, Datawrapper draws thin connecting lines between the columns. Here you can switch to thicker lines, or turn them off entirely. In general, connector lines can make it easier to track developments as you move horizontally across your chart, but hiding them can look cleaner.
• Space between columns: By default, the gap between columns is 40% of the column width. Here you can change this from 0% (no gap at all) to 100%.

For our chart, we decide to change the color for increases to a Nintendo-like blue, remove the connecting lines, and decrease the gap between the columns:

There are three more options in the Columns section:

• Show column for start value: This toggle lets you show or hide the first column (from zero to the first value). This option is toggled on by default. Note that even when hidden, the start value still sets where the first column begins. You can also indicate if the starting column shows a Total or a Difference and customize the Label text if you wish. While hiding the starting column is less common for most use cases, it can be a helpful option if you want readers to only focus on the differences or if you have a particularly large starting value that might otherwise make smaller differences harder to see.
• Show column for end value: Similarly, this toggle shows or hides a column that represents the final value after all differences are added. This option is also toggled on by default; and here too you can customize the Label text.

The latest option is Show subtotals: If your dataset contains an additional column where the changes are assigned into categories, you can use this toggle to insert automatically calculated subtotal columns after each category. Here's an example:

And here's how the dataset looks like for these subtotals:

In this case, we only "group" the first and second column in the chart to show a "Gross profit" subtotal. We could also add more categories in our "Type" data column, to add more subtotals between the start and end column.

Refine: Labels

This section lets you change the style of your labels and where they show up.

• Show totals controls the appearance and number format of the total labels, as well as whether they should be shown on all columns or only on the (sub)total columns.

• Show differences between values allows you to show or hide how much each difference columns adds or subtracts from the previous column. This difference can be displayed as either the absolute difference or the percentage change between the values. In terms of styling options, you can set the number format of the labels, place them inside or outside of the columns, and show the label text in the same color as the column.

• Show color legend gives you the option to display the color key for your different column categories (e.g. increases, decreases, totals), as well as adjust how they appear. To change the label text, click on the text in the list and start typing. To change the order of color legend items, drag an item in the list around. And to stack the color key items on top of each other – for instance, because you have long labels – click on Stack legend items. By default, the color legend is turned off, since the colors (red for decreases, green for increases) are often self-explanatory.

• Prevent label overlapping: In some cases (and most commonly on small screens), column labels can overlap — for example, if two neighboring columns move in the same direction and the difference in value between them is minimal. This toggle gives you the option to automatically hide overlapping labels so they remain legible. By default, this is turned on.

Refine: Tooltips

By default, your waterfall chart will show tooltips: if your readers hover over a column in your chart, they will see the underlying values. Here, you can turn that behavior off.

If you have tooltips enabled, note that any labels you have enabled in the Labels section are always shown in tooltips. If you previously opted to not show labels, but decide you want to show them in your tooltips, you will be shown the same label options as in the Show totals and Show differences between values sections.

Refine: Sorting

By default, Datawrapper displays your columns in the order in which they appear in your dataset. However, you also have the option to override that and instead sort by increases first or decreases first, in ascending order.

Each subtotal group is sorted independently — except in one case: if the column labels are the same across subtotal groups, Datawrapper assumes you want a consistent order so they're easier to compare, and applies the sort order from the first group to all the others.

Refine: Appearance

In the last panel of the Refine tab, you can decide on the height and the size of the margin of your chart.

You can set a fixed plot height, or one based on width that scales with the width of your chart. To learn more about the concept of chart resizing and the difference between fixed and width-based plot height, visit this Academy article.

Annotate

After working through all these options in the Refine tab, let's move on to the next tab: Annotate.

In the Annotate tab, you're first asked to give your visualization a title, description, notes, source, byline, and an alternative description for screen readers. You can find a detailed explanation of all these Annotate options here.

Annotate: Text annotations

The next section lets you add and customize text annotations anywhere on your waterfall chart. It's a really powerful tool, so we wrote an extra article about it. Learn how to create text annotations here.

Annotate: Highlight range

Finally, if you want to draw your reader's attention to one specific time range, the Highlight range tool is perfect. It lets you set semi-transparent colored overlays and lines directly in your chart. To do so, click on Add range highlight. Now select a starting and ending point of the range by clicking in the chart. If you want, you can also change the opacity of the highlighted range. Here's an in-depth explanation of all the options.

Layout & Publish

After adding text to our chart, only one tab is left in step 3: Visualize: The Layout tab. You can find all Layout settings explained in this Academy article. And once you're happy with your settings, it's time to publish! We prepared another detailed Academy article about publishing, embedding, and exporting your chart here.

And that's it! You successfully customized your first waterfall chart.