Creating Waterfall Charts in PowerPoint Using Ampler

Here is a question worth sitting with: why does one of the most widely used chart types in consulting still require a workaround in PowerPoint? This tutorial walks you through a better way to create waterfall charts, using Ampler or Ampler Charts. Yes, native PowerPoint includes a basic waterfall chart option, but it falls short where it matters most: customization and waterfall chart variations. Ampler addresses all of that, and by the end of this tutorial, you will see exactly how.

What’s a Waterfall Chart?
Waterfall Charts in PowerPoint
What are Ampler, or Ampler Charts?
Waterfall Chart Types
Inserting a Waterfall Chart Using Ampler
Entering Your Data
Editing the Waterfall Directly on the Slide
Linking to Excel
Formatting and Brand Consistency
When NOT to Use a Waterfall Chart
Key Takeaways
Conclusion

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What’s a Waterfall Chart?

A waterfall chart shows the cumulative effect of sequentially positive and negative values. Each column represents a distinct category, and the chart builds from a starting base value, with each subsequent column either rising or falling depending on whether the value it represents is positive or negative. The final column shows the cumulative total.

Figure 1, below, shows a basic waterfall chart.

Figure 1: A simple waterfall chart

Popularized by McKinsey, the waterfall chart has collected quite a few nicknames over the years: bridge chart, cascade chart, and the rather evocative flying bricks chart, a nod to those floating columns that seem to defy gravity. As nicknames go, flying bricks is hard to beat.

The chart itself has earned its place in financial analysis, project management, and business consulting. Profit and loss breakdowns, budget versus actuals, revenue bridge analysis, inventory flow, cost reduction scenarios: if your job is to show how a number gets from point A to point B with a few stops in between, the waterfall chart is almost always the right vehicle for the journey.

You May Also Like: Creating Gantt Charts in PowerPoint Using Ampler

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Waterfall Charts in PowerPoint

Here is something worth knowing: while PowerPoint does include a native waterfall chart option, it is limited in customization and visual polish. Adjusting totals, subtotals, connector lines, and colors requires manual intervention.

And those limitations have a cost. You spend time adjusting floating bars, nudging connector lines, and color-coding positive and negative columns manually, and then the numbers change. Back to square one. Ampler changes that entirely, bringing purpose-built waterfall chart functionality into PowerPoint without the manual acrobatics. Subtotals and totals are calculated automatically, connector lines toggle on with a single click, and every visual element is customizable without workarounds.

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What are Ampler, or Ampler Charts?

What happens when consultants who spent years wishing PowerPoint was better, decide to fix it themselves? You get Ampler. Built by ex-Bain consultants, the suite brings consulting-grade charting into Microsoft 365 without the workarounds. Ampler Charts is the charting-focused subset of the suite, purpose-built for the chart types that define professional presentations: Gantt, Mekko, combination charts, and waterfall charts.

Great tools should not cost a fortune, and Ampler takes that seriously. The Ampler Charts-only plan is priced at €12 per month, making professional-grade charting accessible without a significant budget commitment. For those who live and work across Microsoft Office, the full Ampler Suite at €30 per month brings the same gains to Excel, Word, and Outlook.

Ampler is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, a city that gave the world both Hans Christian Andersen and a reputation for clean, purposeful design. There may be something in that tradition that found its way into Ampler’s approach to charts.

Before we proceed further, a word of thanks. Reviews like this one only come together with the help of people who are genuinely invested in what they have built. Sune Høj Kodahl was generous with his time and thorough in his responses throughout this review.

Curious to see it in action? A trial version of both Ampler and Ampler Charts is available directly from the Ampler website, and there is no better way to appreciate what it does than to build a chart yourself.

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Waterfall Chart Types

Ampler supports two waterfall chart types:

• Build-up: Think of a build-up waterfall as counting what you earned. You start with nothing, add your salary, your bonus, your side income, and watch the total climb. The build-up waterfall works the same way: it opens at a base value and accumulates upward, making it ideal for showing how individual components contribute to a final total. Fun fact: this is the format McKinsey used most often in client presentations to show revenue growth drivers.
• Build-down: The build-down is the other side of that story. Think of it as reading your payslip. You start with a promising gross salary and then watch it shrink as taxes, deductions, and contributions do their work. The build-down waterfall opens at a total and works downward, making it the right choice when you need to show how costs, deductions, or losses reduce a starting figure.

Does that make the build-up inherently positive and the build-down negative? Not at all. The mood depends entirely on the data, not the direction. A build-up can tell a cautionary tale: showing how costs accumulate to an unexpectedly high total is hardly an uplifting story, even if the bars move upward. A build-down can be equally positive: starting with gross revenue and showing how efficiently a business converts it to net profit with minimal deductions is a story worth telling. The direction reflects the structure of the data, not the sentiment behind it. Choose the type that fits your data and the story you want to tell, then proceed to insert.

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Inserting a Waterfall Chart Using Ampler

Creating a waterfall chart in PowerPoint using Ampler is straightforward. The steps below walk you through the full process, from setting up your slide to placing the chart. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Launch PowerPoint with the Ampler or Ampler Charts add-in active. You will typically see a slide with a Title and Content layout. We will now change our slide layout to Title Only. To do so, access the Home tab of the Ribbon. Next, click on the Slide Layout button, highlighted in blue within Figure 2, below. In the ensuing drop-down gallery, choose the Title Only option, highlighted in red within Figure 2.

The data used in this waterfall chart is dummy data, and you will have to input your own data to make a waterfall chart that’s relevant to you. We explore how to do so in the next section.

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Entering Your Data

You will now populate this waterfall chart with your own data, using an Excel datasheet.

When entering values in the datasheet, follow these rules:

• The starting value must go in the Total cell at the beginning of the datasheet, highlighted in red within Figure 9, below.
• Positive values go in cells within the Increase row, highlighted in blue.
• Negative values go in cells within the Decrease cell, entered as negative numbers, highlighted in green.
• To add an intermediate subtotal column at any point in the chart, add an “e” to the Total series cell at that position, highlighted in orange.
• To add a final cumulative total column at the end of the chart, add a “t” to the Total series cell at the end of the datasheet, highlighted in purple.
• All values in the Total row in the Excel sheet are called base/total values. It doesn’t matter whether they are Start, Intermediate, or End totals.

Figure 9: Add waterfall chart values in the datasheet

The chart updates in real time as you enter data. The cumulative total is calculated automatically. Close the Excel datasheet and the chart is ready to show and edit further in PowerPoint.

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Editing the Waterfall Directly on the Slide

One of Ampler’s more practical features is direct on-slide editing. For waterfall charts, this is true for almost everything other than the actual data itself, which you will have to edit using the datasheet, as explained in the preceding section.

To make formatting edits, click any column with the primary mouse button to select it. Doing so brings up two floating panes. The topmost one provides access to formatting options, highlighted in red within Figure 10, below. The bottom one, highlighted in blue, reverses the series order shown in the chart legend.

Figure 10: Primary click options

We explored clicking on a specific chart element such as a column. Let us now select the entire waterfall chart and click. Doing so will bring up the two floating panes you see in Figure 11, below. The top pane, highlighted in red, contains formatting options. The other pane, highlighted in blue, contains several other options, most of which are accessible through easy, drop-down lists.

Figure 11: Primary click options for the entire chart

Right-clicking a selected chart element brings up a contextual menu. To see options that apply to the entire chart, click the chart edge to select it first, then right-click. The resulting menu, shown highlighted in red within Figure 12, below, covers the full range of chart-level settings.

Figure 12: Right click options for a waterfall chart

Right-clicking different elements of the chart produces different menus. On an individual column, the menu offers options to change its type, color, or label. At the chart level, the same right-click approach controls connector lines, axis scales, and the visibility of chart elements.

You can also open the Excel datasheet using the Open datasheet option highlighted in blue within Figure 12, above. Also, if you need to delete the entire chart, you can click the Delete chart option, highlighted in orange. There’s also the Establish Excel link option, highlighted in green that we explore in the next section.

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Linking to Excel

Here is a question worth asking before you start typing: do you already have this data in Excel? If the answer is yes, put the keyboard down. There is no need to enter the same numbers twice. Click on the waterfall chart, and you will see the Establish Excel link option, highlighted in green within Figure 11. Alternatively, right-click, and you will see the Establish Excel link option, highlighted in green within Figure 12. Click on any of these options, and an Establish Excel link window opens, shown in Figure 13, below.

Figure 13: Establish Excel link window

If you already had an Excel sheet open with suitable data, the Establish Excel link window would have auto populated all fields for you. But this is an easy problem to resolve. Close this Establish Excel link window, open your Excel sheet, select your data, and then within PowerPoint, summon the Establish Excel link window. Ampler will now auto-detect the data, as shown in the Establish Excel link window in Figure 14, below.

Figure 14: Waterfall chart linked to existing Excel data

You cannot use any data to create a waterfall chart. So, do note that data needs to be in a format that can be relevant to a waterfall chart.

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Formatting and Brand Consistency

Ampler gives you precise control over every visual element of your waterfall chart. Here is how to approach formatting:

1. Colors

The most widely accepted color convention for waterfall charts uses green for positive columns, red for negative columns, and a neutral tone such as grey or dark navy for base and total columns. This three-color system is deliberate: green and red carry immediate directional meaning for most audiences, while the neutral base and total columns anchor the chart without competing visually with the movement bars. Using more than three colors is generally discouraged in consulting and financial presentation contexts, as it introduces visual noise without adding analytical value. The convention is so well established that audiences familiar with waterfall charts will often read the chart by color before reading the labels.

To change column colors, click any column on the chart to select. Do note that if you select any of the base/total columns, the other base/column columns will also be selected, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 15, below. The same is true for positive and negative columns as well.

Figure 15: Selected base and total columns

Then, carefully click on any of these columns to bring up a floating pane similar to PowerPoint’s Mini Toolbar, as shown highlighted in green, within Figure 16, below. Next, click the downward arrow within the Fill Color button, as shown highlighted in blue.

Figure 16: Change fill color for a column

Doing so brings up PowerPoint’s default Theme colors, as shown in Figure 17, below. You can choose a new color or even click on the handy Eyedropper option, highlighted in red within Figure 17. This works like PowerPoint’s Eyedropper option.

Figure 17: Theme colors and Eyedropper option

Positive and negative columns should be color-coded differently to make the direction of each change immediately clear to the audience. This is one of the five best practices for waterfall charts and something Ampler makes straightforward with a single click.

2. Connector Lines

Imagine reading a sentence with all the spaces removed. The words are all there, but making sense of them takes considerably more effort. Connector lines in a waterfall chart work like those spaces: they give the audience a clear visual pause between each column, making it easy to follow the sequence from left to right without losing track.

In usability studies on financial charts, connector lines consistently reduce the time it takes audiences to correctly interpret a waterfall chart. Follow these steps to explore how you can use connectors:

1. Right-click the chart and select the Waterfall connectors option in the resultant menu, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 18, below. If it is already active, don’t deactivate this option.

3. Annotations

A waterfall chart already tells a story. Ampler adds four annotations that act like the narrator, pointing out what matters and saying it in numbers:

• CAGR arrows show the compound annual growth rate between two points on the chart. Think of average speed on a road trip. You did not drive at exactly 80 km/h the whole way, with traffic and snack stops along the way. But the average tells you the steady pace that would have got you from A to B within the same time. A CAGR arrow does that for growth. It smooths out the bumps and gives you one steady yearly rate.
• Total differences show the overall change from the first column to the last. This is the elevator ride from the ground floor to the top floor. You skip the stairs in between and see only how far you traveled from start to finish.
• Level differences show how big the change is between two specific columns. Picture two steps on a staircase and a tape measure held between them. You are not asking how the staircase got there. You are asking how much higher one step sits than the other. Pick any two columns, and the level difference gives you the gap.
• Value lines draw a horizontal line across the chart at a value you choose. Think of the pass mark on an exam paper. One line shows at a glance which columns clear it and which fall short. Use it for a target, a budget, or a break-even point.

Used together, the four annotations answer different questions: how fast it grew, how far apart two moments are, where it all ended up, and how it compares with the number that matters.

These annotations can be added directly from the right-click menu, with all four options visible at the top of the menu, highlighted in red within Figure 23, below.

Figure 23: Annotation options for waterfall charts

These are all useful when you want to surface a key insight directly on the chart rather than in a separate text box. That said, one or two annotations is usually enough. Using all four at once risks saying too many things simultaneously, which can dilute the chart’s core message.

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When NOT to Use a Waterfall Chart

A waterfall chart is a specialist, not a generalist. It does one thing well: showing how a number moves from point A to point B through a series of ups and downs. Ask it to do anything else and it starts to struggle. Here is when to call in a substitute:

• When trends over time matter. Waterfall charts are not time machines. If the story is about how something changed across months or years, a line chart handles that job.
• When category comparison matters. If you are comparing five products, three regions, or two teams, a bar chart gives each one equal footing. A waterfall chart would force a sequential story onto data that has no natural sequence.
• When composition matters. There is a difference between what changed a total and what makes up a total. If you want to show the latter, a stacked chart is the right call. A waterfall chart shows the journey; a stacked chart shows the destination’s contents.
• When there are more than 12 adjustments. Fun fact: research on working memory suggests that most people can hold around seven items in their head at once. A waterfall chart with 15 bars pushes well past that limit. When the bridge gets that long, group the smaller items or consider a different chart entirely.

Knowing when not to use a waterfall chart is half the battle. The other half is having the right alternative ready. Ampler supports all the chart types listed above, along with a full range of others, which means switching to the right chart for your data never requires leaving the add-in.

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Key Takeaways

Waterfall charts are simple in concept. A number goes in, things happen to it, and a number comes out. Ampler keeps that simplicity intact on the slide.

Native PowerPoint can produce a waterfall chart. It just takes longer than it should, and the result needs attention every time the data changes. Ampler removes both problems. For anyone who presents financial or operational data regularly, the time saved on formatting and recalculation adds up quickly. The Charts-only plan costs €12 per month, which is a fair price for a tool that pays for itself on the first chart.

Here are some takeaways:

• Waterfall charts show how a value changes from start to finish. Build-up versions emphasize accumulation, and build-down versions emphasize deductions.
• Ampler automates subtotals, connectors, and formatting.
• Excel linking removes manual updates.
• Chart-design best practices improve audience comprehension.

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Conclusion

A well-built waterfall chart does not need much explanation. The numbers speak, the colors direct the eye, and the audience follows without being led. Ampler is built around that idea: that the chart should do the work, and the process of building it should stay out of the way. For anyone who presents financial or operational data regularly, that is worth something.

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