By Lindsay Lamb
With the election and obsessively recent rise in Covid cases, I have been spending a lot of time obsessively reviewing data. That coupled with reviewing recent survey data from teachers and students regarding their experiences in school (both in person and online), has left me knee deep in data. No matter where I review data, I keep coming across the same problem (which happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves): survey questions not displaying properly in a visualization.
Survey questions do not display properly when the survey question is too long, and instead of being able to read the full sentence, you get this:
In some cases, you can resize the entire graph which can sometimes help. However, if you have limited space to display your data, you need to make some changes. You can either shorten survey item in your figure (which should signal that you should shorten the item when you administer the survey), allow the ellipses (my eye is twitching just writing this), or only show some of the responses (maybe set up small multiples).
If you do nothing (as in the figure above), this can be problematic. As the consumer of the data, you have to guess what the survey question is before you can make sense of the data. This is difficult and ultimately takes away from the overall meaning of the data. Sometimes you don’t choice. Some data dashboard programs (like Vocalize) do not allow you to change the space allocated to survey item labels. If, however, you are up for some Excel Ninja hacking, keep reading!
If you are using excel, simply change the data label by creating a fake row (I learned this super cool trick from Stephanie Evergreen), adding a data label for the fake data, and then displaying the survey questions with each corresponding label. Here’s a quick tutorial:
- Create a fake column with fake data.
- Now, add data labels in the figure to your fake data bars. As you can see, my fake data column contains one entry of 100% and the rest are 0%. I did this so I could easily grab the bar corresponding with the 100% data entry and add a label to it and all entries in that series (see below):
- Now, change the label position so it is to the left your bar and add the survey question. If you are using a Mac, you have to type in each survey item. I know this is tedious, especially if you have a lot of survey questions, but it is worth it. You can clone data labels if you have found a position you like you can clone this in the label option menu. If you have a PC, in the label menu you can select label values from a range in your spreadsheet and voila! Done!
- Still seeing some ellipses? No problem! You can now manipulate the size and position of your survey labels. Yay!!!
Here is a revised version of the visualization:
I should also note that I removed the axis Y-values and removed the horizontal tick marks to clean it up a bit.
This chart is still a lot to take in, so in reality I would recommend splitting it up, or changing the color of items to either highlight the most or least common practices… but that is for another day and another blog post 🙂