Power BI - Tornado Chart

In this article, we shall discuss Power BI’s custom visualization chart - Tornado chart from their App source. We shall look at how to create a Tornado chart and its various features. At the end of this article, you will learn how to create a Tornado Chart, its Navigation, and the various usages of the chart.

Tornado Chart

Tornado charts are a special type of Bar chart, where the data categories are listed vertically instead of the standard horizontal presentation, and the categories are ordered so that the largest bar appears at the top of the chart, the second-largest appears second from the top, and so on.

Typically, you choose a “low” and a “high” value for each input. This is an open-source visual. This is used for comparing two distinct groups like Men and Women, East and West, USA and China.

This is the below Sample data related to the Amazon Subcategory sales between two regions - West and East. For this article, we are using sample superstore data.

Steps to create a Tornado chart

1. Open new PowerBI file. Select Excel data type to connect with the data. it will ask you to browse the data from your local machine.

Select Sample superstore data and get connected.

2. Since Tornado chart is custom chart, we need to import it. Click on the three dots below charts and click on Get more visuals.

Search for Tornedo Chart in the search box. And click on the same which will appear.

Click on Add Button to add Tornado Chart in the list of visualization.

3. Select on the newly added Tornado Chart and the new Chart will be added to the canvas.

4. Now drag following columns as shown in the image below

Sub-Category ⇨ Group 
Region ⇨ Legend 
Sales ⇨ Values

5. Finally, we get the chart as shown below:

6. We can compare Central and East Region with respect to their Sales. We can compare any regions by adding a filter. Drag the Region to Filters. And user can select any two regions for the comparison.