Analysing the distribution of numeric values, such as those found in surveys, demonstrates unique benefits of using NextAnalytics as your processing engine.

1. When analysing survey or polling data, you are usually faced with a data table full of codes for each that correspond to the answer selected for each question.

2. To figure out what each code means, there is usually a lookup table which may contain other information, such as the order that items are to appear in reports. In this case, we have a 1-to-5 scale that translates from Disappointing-to-Outstanding.

3. The first step in analyzing the responses would be to get the count of each of the response values. nextanalytics makes this very easy with a single command.  We can now see the distribution of responses for each of the questions. It was not necessary to predefine the columns -- nextanalytics created columns for every value in the source data.

Note that NextAnalytics recognizes the concept of ‘missing’ values which is different from a zero value. Missing values are automatically excluded from any analytical computations, so they do not affect things like Average Score calculations.

4. Next, we swap the rows and columns.

5. Singling out the Food Variety question, we move it into the lookup table previously loaded. nextanalytics automatically ensures that the row label values (the first column) align when the data is merged, so the values for Row_Caption ‘4’ are placed on the matching Rating '4' row. While we could place the column anywhere in the destination table, we have chosen to place it in the third column.

6. We can also move columns within a table, in this case swapping the first two columns,  and drop the unecessary columns completely.  It is also a simple matter to automatically rename the right column to 'Count' as desired in the final report.

7. Notice that there is no Count value for ‘Disappointing’ because there was no source data with that option selected. In the final report, we would prefer this to be displayed as zero, so we use nextanalytics to fill empty values with zeroes. We then convert the count numbers into a percentage of the column total, and add that column to the report.

8. Finally, let’s drop a background image corresponding to the percentage value to visually reinforce the distribution of the results. This is easily done using nextanalytics alert feature.

While there are a number of different ways that this report could have been created, we chose this combination to show a broad range of nextanalytic’s capabilities.