Create Your First Waterfall
After installing Innofalls Charts and creating a new visual in your report, you are ready to create your first waterfall chart.
Basic Setup
To create a waterfall chart, you need to fill at least two fields: Levels and Values. For example, fill in Market into Levels and AC into Values. This already shows a running totals waterfall chart. The chart shows a total bar at the end, summing up all previous data points.
Note that Innofalls automatically chooses temporal orientation (some say rotation), if you fill in a temporal dimension. You can set a fixed orientation in the menu. Read more.
Stacking
When you add multiple measures into Values, you get a stacked waterfall chart.
Stacking is the default option for multiple measures. If you prefer to have each measure in a separate waterfall chart, you can do so by choosing a Stack / Column option.
Drill Downs
To enable drill downs, you have to add two or more dimensions into Levels. This gives you the option to click an element to see how it is made up.
Also note that a plus icon appears next to each category, which enables you to expand it.
Now, if you click an element in the chart, you will make a drill down into it. In this case we drilled into Energy, to see all underlying Accounts:
You will notify 4 buttons above the main chart. This is our drill down history. It gives us a retrospection on our previous level. Depending on the size of the visual, the drill down history will be shown as a chart (enough space) or as buttons (less space).
The drill down history offers an important ability: We can select additional elements from the previous level to drill down into.
Delta Waterfall Chart
Select another element with a click while holding down the control key (CTRL). The Innofalls visual creates a delta waterfall between the two selected elements, automatically calculating the differences between the two.
You can select any combination of elements in the history, to make the comparisons you need.
Note that by default, the waterfall type is selected automatically. When two or more elements in the drill down history are selected, the visual chooses the delta waterfall. If you need to keep the running totals visualization, you can change the type anytime in the menu.
Usage Considerations
At this point, you can finalize the chart in its current form by hiding the drill-down history and disabling navigation controls, making it ready for your report. This ensures that the report viewer cannot make further modifications to the chart.
Alternatively, you can keep the drill-down history and controls enabled, allowing experienced report viewers to interact with and explore the visual data in greater detail.
Customization
The Innofalls Charts offer you a lot of customization options, accessible from the property pane. For example, by default the category width is limited. To disable this, locate the property Limit Category Width under Sizes and Spaces to disable this. In our case this makes our Drill Down History elements wider and more legible.
Now that you created your first waterfall chart, head to the next section to read about all the data fields our visual has to offer.
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