Waterfall charts are not referenced anywhere else in this book, so I will cover them now. Waterfall charts exist primarily for a single use case: to show profit and loss across various categories or over a time period. The idea behind a waterfall chart is that it shows the individual contribution of each category (or time period) to the overall total, while showing the overall total at the end.
That being said, profit and loss calculations and visualizations are extremely useful to almost any business. So, don't ignore the waterfall chart! You should also consider a waterfall chart whenever you have a measure that is changing and you need to know how much it changed by overall, how much each event changed, or the event that contributed the most to that overall change. Let's go over them now:
- Good for visualizing: Profit and loss (P&L) data—...
