How to make a Sankey diagram in Google Sheets (the practical way)

Google Sheets is where a huge number of income statements and budgets actually live, so it's no surprise people want to turn them into a Sankey without leaving the tab. The catch is the same as in Excel: Sheets has no native Sankey chart. The Insert chart menu stops at the usual bars, lines and pies. What follows is how people work around that today, and a shortcut that skips the busywork entirely.

What creators actually do today

Watch how income-statement Sankeys get made and a pattern emerges: a lot of them are built by hand. Someone has the numbers neatly in Sheets, then opens Insert > Drawing and manually places boxes and thick connector lines to mimic the flows, eyeballing the widths. Others screenshot the figures and rebuild the whole thing in a separate design tool. It looks polished when it's done, but the chart isn't connected to the data — change a number and you're editing the drawing again.

• Google Sheets has no built-in Sankey chart type.
• Drawings and connector lines aren't tied to your cells, so nothing updates automatically.
• Ribbon widths drawn by hand are rarely truly proportional to the numbers.
• Rebuilding it in another tool every month is the real time sink.

The Apps Script route (for the technical few)

If you're comfortable with code, you can write a Google Apps Script that pipes your range into a charting library and renders a Sankey. It's genuinely flexible, but it's also a mini software project: you maintain the script, the data mapping and the styling yourself. For most people that's far more than the job is worth.

The shortcut: paste the range, get the chart

The realization that saves the most time is that the hard part of a Sankey is the layout, not the data — and your data is already clean in Sheets. So instead of redrawing anything, select the cells that hold your flows (a source column, a target column and an amount, or just a normal income-statement block) and paste them into MakeCharts. The flows are read directly from the range, and the AI copilot can infer the structure from a plain P&L if your sheet isn't in source-target form.

From there the finance conventions are one step away: color costs red and profit green, keep the revenue trunk neutral, and label nodes with their value. Export a crisp SVG for slides or a PNG for docs and social, watermark-free on paid plans. Because the layout and colors are saved, next month is a paste-over, not a rebuild.

You can make a Sankey-like image in Google Sheets with a Drawing if you only need it once. But if the chart is something you'll share and update, keep the numbers in Sheets and let a Sankey-native tool handle the ribbons — it's the difference between a monthly chore and a two-minute paste.