27 thoughts on “Easy creation of tornado charts in Excel – 5 steps, no add-ins

  1. Pingback: Juan C. Mendez’s pages » Blog Archive » System dynamics interpretation of the logistic and Bass models

  2. Thank you for the tips, I was able to recreate it! However, I can not figure out how to get the category labels over to the left side like you do. Mine keep coming up on top of the bar graphs. How do you move them to the far left?

  3. I am looking for a easy, straight forward way to create a tornado diagram without an addin…I see you have an example, but the examples are, for some reason, not available. is there a way to see this example? it would help to understand your capabilities.

    Thanks

    Joe

  4. Pingback: Tornado Charts in Excel 2007 Update | Juan Carlos Méndez-García

  5. Is it possible to compare two tornadoes in the one graph, it seems that you can only have 1 “Category (X) axis crosses at:”

  6. Isn't this just a hard-coded sensitivity analysis? This works really well for a small analysis, but if you have more than 4 inputs it will be very tedious getting the outputs for a chart.

    • Tony – the tornado chart does not have anything to do with how simple, sophisticated, "hard coded" or flexible is your analysis.

      It is more about visualization of your results. Although I've seen tornadoes used in engineering/technical settings, the focus of what is presented here is managerial decision making, so keeping it simple with 4-5 key sensitivities works best *in that context*

      In many cases, behind one of these charts there is a deep analysis using large models, and techniques like Monte-Carlo analysis. In others, the key sensitivities are determined by experience with a few subject matter experts. At the end, what is important is to find the appropriate level of analysis to support the required decision.

      Hope it helps

  7. Brilliant, thank you.

    Now I have two problems:
    1. How to put categories on left side of page, as in your example?
    2. How to link base case value to cell reference so that it updates automatically?

    Thanks for tips on these two problems.

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