Waterfall charts (also known as flying brick or Mario charts) are used to represent the cumulative effects of new data. The first bar represents the starting position (stock in a warehouse for example) and subsequent bricks add or subtract from this bar (stock is added or taken from the warehouse). The final bar represents the effect of adding all the bricks together. These were made popular by McKinsey and Company. A number of add-ons and methods can be used to create waterfall charts. These include:
Commercial
Aploris provides a suite of tools to enhance PowerPoint and Excel presentations. Waterfall charts are just one of a number of very useful add-ons.
A waterfall chart creator for Excel provides a menu driven interface and is available as an add-in.
FusionCharts provides a waterfall chart as part of its large JavaScript charting library.
Free
Plusx – a free Excel add-in allows users to create Waterfall, Gantt, Mirror, BubbleX and Double Donut Charts.
ReportValue offers an online waterfall chart facility. It is based on D3.js, and can be used without coding. The resulting waterfall chart can be downloaded as an image or SVG file.
A manual method of creating waterfall charts in PowerPoint can be found here.
A number of sites explain how to create waterfall charts in Excel – one of the better ones can be found here.
jqPlot provides the JavaScript to create waterfall charts.
d3 code for JavaScript waterfall charts.
RGraph supports waterfall charts.