With the recent Facebook IPO, Facebook had to open their books to investors, which you can peruse for yourself at the SEC website here. (For an eye-opener, do a search for the phrase “Mr. Zuckerberg’s use of private aircraft in 2011” and see if you can find the total bill for flying the “friend me” skies)

These company registration statements often have dense “blue bar” looking financial tables like this:

A great way to view this type of financial information is a “waterfall chart”. Excel guru Jon Peltier shows how to make one in Excel here.

Here’s the same facebook data, visualized as a “waterfall chart” in Tableau (reverse-engineered from a Joe Mako special here):

Instead of using a red-green color scheme (thanks for the tip, Steve), I went with the standard financial color scheme where “in the black” = cashflow IN and “in the red” = cashflow OUT.

Coming soon: How to Make a Waterfall Chart in Tableau!

Thanks for stopping by!
Ben