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Breakdown Bar (Results)


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About Breakdown Bars

Breakdown Bars allow you to look at how your answer choices or field values for a given data source compare to each other as components of a whole. The possible answer choices are each represented as a segment of the bar, taking up space proportional to how many respondents selected or were assigned the value. This makes them great for displaying percentage data, much like the Pie Chart.

Answers to How frequently do you contact our support team? displayed as colored sections on a horizontal bar

Customization Options

For general settings, see the Visualizations Overview support page. Read on for settings specific to the Breakdown Bar.

Labels

You have three size options for labels: large, small, and bottom. Large labels are always placed above small labels directly on the segment of the bar. Bottom labels are moved to the legend.

The information you can include in your labels is as follows:

  • Category name: The answer choice text or field value name.
  • Percent: The percentage of respondents who selected or were assigned the value.
  • Response count: The number of respondents who selected or were assigned the value.

Breakdown bar with Percent set as the large label, category name as the small labels, and response count as the bottom labels

In the example above, the category names are written as large labels, the percentage of respondents who fit each category are written as small labels, and the number of respondents who belong to each category have been allocated to the legend.

You are allowed to include the same information in each area, so be sure when adjusting these settings that you deselect settings you don’t want to include anymore.

Qtip: When the segment is too small, the labels won’t show up anymore. Resize with caution.

Legend Values

You have a variety of options concerning the category names (or “legend values”), including the following:

  • Change the legend value text by clicking directly into the text box for the name and entering the new name.
    Typing in the field of a Legend Value
  • Adjust the color of the option by clicking directly on the color box to the left of the value and selecting a new color.
    Changing the color of a legend value
  • Change the order the values appear in the visualization by clicking to the left of a value and dragging it to its desired position.
    clicking and dragging legend values to rearrange them
  • Hide values from the visualization by deselecting the checkbox to the left of the value.
    legend value deselected doesn't appear as a colored section in the breakdown bar

Hidden groups

By default, when you hide values from your Breakdown Bar, those values still contribute to the percentages displayed for each option remaining in the visualization.

Percentages on the breakdown bar calculated to include deselected legend values

You can choose exclude these hidden values by switching the Include hidden groups in percents option to No.

Hidden legend value is excluded from the calculation of percentages in the breakdown bar

Incompatible Fields

Breakdown Bars are compatible with most scaled and discrete data, such as any question with a multiple choice option. It is easier to list the fields they are not compatible with, which includes:

In general, open text and continuous numeric data do not work well with Breakdown Bars. Breakdown Bars are better at showing percentages of a whole, and so are not as useful for statistical data like averages.