SmartVisuals Tornado
by SmartVisuals.io
Sensitivity tornado, butterfly and population pyramid: swing around a base, inputs, % of total
The tornado chart that actually does sensitivity analysis. Give it the output at each driver's low and high input and the base case: bars swing around the base, the widest swing goes on top, and each driver's assumptions (€620/t, 3 months, 7.5%) sit at the bar ends. Unlike two-measure butterfly visuals, it anchors the bars at your base case. The same visual draws butterfly charts, population pyramids and diverging stacked bars - the chart type follows your fields.
Free features:
- Sensitivity tornado with up to 5 drivers: base line with label, swing sort, input assumptions with per-driver units, change vs base in value or %, swing column, materiality threshold
- Colour by effect (worse or better than base, with a lower-is-better switch for costs) or by input (low or high), optional hatching so direction never depends on colour alone
- Inverse drivers and drivers with both results on one side of the base are drawn correctly
- Butterfly and population pyramid in full: two measures or one measure split by a field, category labels in the centre spine, % of grand total, of each side or of each row, winner emphasis, independent scales per side
- Age bands split by Male / Female draw as a population pyramid on the first drop: oldest band on top, men on the left (or pick the Pyramid sort for any banded data)
- Diverging stacked bars: losses left of zero, gains right, net marker - or survey answers with the first series on the left and a neutral split at zero
- Sort by swing, value, total, difference or name; Top N with Others; drill-down hierarchies
- Four themes with their own personality, colours per category with Power BI conditional formatting (fx): one rule colours every driver
- Accessibility card: focus outline colour and width, minimum text size, hatching so direction never depends on colour alone
- Full keyboard navigation (one tab stop, rows and bars, context menu), screen-reader labels with values, inputs and swing, a dedicated high-contrast rendering, 5 languages
- Cross-filtering, tooltips and report-page tooltips
Premium features (per-user licence via Microsoft AppSource, $1.99 per user per month or $19 per year, first month free):
- Sensitivity analysis with more than 5 drivers (without a licence, readers see the 5 widest drivers and a note)
- Reference overlay: last quarter's analysis, prior year or budget as an outline, tick or ghost bar
- Small multiples: one tornado or pyramid per project, plant or region, with a shared or own scale
- Share-of-variance and cumulative columns for the sensitivity tornado
- Butterfly difference column (difference and difference %)
Every premium feature is fully unlocked while you edit, so you can evaluate everything before buying; a short note tells an unlicensed author how many drivers their readers will see. Viewers without a licence always see a working chart in the free tier - never a blocked or watermarked visual. No data leaves Power BI: the visual makes no external calls.
Built for FP&A and controllers (NPV and budget sensitivity), capex committees and project finance, engineering and risk teams, HR analytics (workforce pyramids) and sales operations (win/loss).
Documentation, use cases and FAQ: https://smartvisuals.io/visuals/tornado-chart - Support: https://smartvisuals.io/support#tornado-chart - hello@smartvisuals.io