Introduction

The Waterfall view, also known as a cascading bar view, was added to Omniscope Evo in June 2021 (2021.2 b21211). At the time of writing it is an experimental view, however we intend to make it a core non-experimental view shortly.

In this article we will explain how to use the Waterfall view with a simple use-case example.

What is the Waterfall view?

The Waterfall view is a type of bar chart that shows the positive and negative change in value of a measure. It is used in various types of analysis, from inventory analysis to performance analysis.

Example

In this example we are going to use the Waterfall chart as part of an inventory analysis dashboard.

Let's imagine that we work for a company that buys and sells second hand mobile phones. For each type of phone we keep track of the number of units in stock. Unfortunately some of the phones we buy are damaged or have defects and cannot be sold on. Luckily we have a great repair department who refurbish the damaged phones. Once a phone has been refurbished we can include it in our available stock for sale.

We are going to build a dashboard that allows us to select a type of phone and show us the number of units in stock, the number of damaged units and the number of damaged units that have been refurbished. We will use the Waterfall to automatically show us how many units are available for us to sell.

Firstly, lets create a new Omniscope project:

We need to generate the data for our report. We could link to a file or a database, but in this case we're going to use the Text Input block to enter some sample data.

In your workflow click the Add block button and select Text input:

Add the fields Product, Units in stock, Damaged and Refurbished and enter some data:

Add a Blank report block and connect it to the Text input block:

Click on the report. Now we can start to build our dashboard.

Lets add a Waterfall view. Click on the Add view button and scroll down or search for Waterfall view:

Now open the Split menu and select (Multi measures: name):

Open the Measure menu and add the following 3 measures:

    1. Units in stock (Sum).

    2. Formula measure configured with formula -SUBSET_SUM([Damaged]).

    3. Refurbished (Sum).

Now lets look at our waterfall chart:

We can see that we have around 850 units in stock. The formula measure we configured represents the number of damaged units and we can see the number of refurbished units. Let's improve the look of this chart. 

Open the Measure menu and click on each measure in turn. Click on the measure function and you should see options the set the colour and name. Lets set the colour of our Units in stock and Refurbished measures to green and set the colour of the Formula measure to red. Lets also rename all of the measures so we don't show the function applied:

Now open the Bar menu and click on the Colour pill. Select Multi measures: name to colour each bar according to the measure colours we previously assigned:

Now lets show the value inside each bar. In the Bar menu expand the Label section and select Show value:

Finally, we want to see the number of units we can actually sell. We can do this by creating a total bar. Select the Total menu and tick Show total bar:

Lets look at our Waterfall view again:

The view clearly shows us that we currently have 854 phones in stock; 92 of our phones are damaged however our amazing repair team has fixed 33 of these, meaning we have 765 available to sell. 

Lets setup a filter that will allow us to highlight the totals for a single phone type.

Click the Add view menu and select Filters. In the filters menu select Product:

Now click on the tog in the product filter and change the selection type to Single:

We can now view the stock levels for each phone type individually:

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or feedback. The IOZ file for this example is available below: