Breakdown Bar (Results)

Suite
Strategy & Research
Product
Qualtrics

What's on this page

Qtip: There is a new version of Results available. To opt in to the new Results Dashboards, navigate to the Results tab and click Try it now.

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.

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.

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.
  • Adjust the color of the option by clicking directly on the color box to the left of the value and selecting a new color.
  • Change the order the values appear in the visualization by clicking to the left of a value and dragging it to its desired position.
  • Hide values from the visualization by deselecting the checkbox to the left of the value.

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.

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

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.

Was this helpful?

The feedback you submit here is used only to help improve this page.

That's great! Thank you for your feedback!

Thank you for your feedback!