Getting ready

Open a new SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards file and enter data in the spreadsheet as shown in the following screenshot. As you can see in row 3, the first and final value (January and December) show the total stock level, instead of the change relative to the previous period, as is shown in the other months:

How to do it...

How it works...

Instead of showing the total value for each category, the waterfall chart shows how an initial value (January) changes over time until it ends in the final value (December). To make this work, you have to make sure that the first and final values of your dataset represent the actual initial and final value. The other values that are in between should only represent the amount of increase or decrease of a value.

There's more...

There are four categories of values in a waterfall chart: initial value, final value, positive value, and negative value. These values all have their own color. Initially, the positive values are green and the negative ones are red. In the Series sub-tab within the Appearance tab of the properties pane, you can change the color of each type of value: