Data Visualization with Microsoft Power BI

Chapter 13. Tornado Chart

For the practice, please download a special dataset.

A tornado chart looks similar to a funnel divided into two parts. One indicator is displayed on the left, and another one on the right. A tornado chart provides a comparison of two indicators, with an emphasis not within a category but on the correlation as a whole. Tornado charts help you to compare the values of two indicators and visually evaluate the impact of one of them on the other.

In this chapter we will analyze sales data by managers and cities:

• Revenue (synonym of sales actual)

• Sales target

• Profit (synonym of margin actual)

• Quantity (units sold)

In Figure 13-1, you can see that the bigger the profit, the bigger the revenues.

Figure 13-1. Tornado chart displays correlation between profit and revenue

We could show the same data on the bar chart (see Figure 13-2), but when comparing data of different scales, the bars with smaller indicator values (in our case, profit) can almost disappear, and the true meaning of the chart gets lost.

Figure 13-2. Comparison of two indicators of different scales with the bar chart could be misleading

The tornado chart has the advantage of allowing us to compare indicators with different units of measurement, such as sales in dollars and in units (refer to ...