Tornado Diagrams in Excel Tutorial

Dataset to Make a Tornado Diagram with XLSTAT

The data was created for the sake of this tutorial and is therefore fictitious.
We are going to compare the online and in-store gross sales of different types of teas from a wholesale tea company. We therefore present 10 different types of teas, and we will see how a tornado graph will allow us to easily discover opportunities to increase our sales.

Setting Up the Tornado Diagram Feature in XLSTAT

• Open XLSTAT.

• Select the XLSTAT/ Visualizing data / Tornado diagram. The dialog box pops up.

• In the XLSTAT interface, select tornado diagram in the format.

• Select the two data columns corresponding to the online and the in-store tea sales.

• Select the first column of the dataset as the labels.

• Click on OK.

Interpret the Results of the Tornado Diagram

First, a table with some descriptive statistics on the variables entered is displayed.
Then, the tornado graph is displayed. On this graph, it is particularly important to look at the first lines, which are those with the highest sales volume.
In particular, we can see that Earl Gray tea is the best-selling tea, whether online or in stores. Darjeeling tea is notably sold more online versus in stores.
Overall, this graph allows you to see very quickly which teas are the most sold. Therefore, we could focus our work on communication on these first few teas. We could also try to understand why Darjeeling is sold much more online than in stores. Several strategies can be put in place to increase our sales volume.