By: Eric Parker
Eric lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx for 5 years. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email.
When you are working with survey data, you will occasionally come across situations where survey questions are multiple choice and those multiple choice responses are comma-delimited in a single cell.
Take this nutritional survey for instance.
Daily goals are broken out and delimited by commas. Let’s say we’d like to know what percent of respondents chose “Take Vitamins” as one of their three goals. There isn’t an easy way to do that with the current data setup.
What we’ll do is create a custom split on Daily Goals and choose comma as the delimiter. We want to generate “All” possible columns.
Next, we can pivot all the split-out daily goals into a single column.
After outputting the data to Tableau Desktop and doing some crafty calculations, we’re able to tell how many respondents listed “Take Vitamins” as one of their daily goals.
Here are the calculations for reference.
To calculate the total number of respondents who took vitamins.
To calculate the percent of total respondents.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to use the comments, reach out directly, or even book an office hour to work on your own survey data together!