Dataskera

Likert Chart

Survey answers on an ordered scale, one row per question, diverging around a centre so agreement and disagreement grow away from each other instead of being read off a common left edge. The whole difficulty of this chart is the middle of the scale, and that is where most implementations quietly choose for you.

Data Requirements

Your Tableau worksheet should include:

  • 1 Dimension for the Question encoding. One row per value.
  • 1 Dimension for the Response encoding. The answer scale, in its own order from most negative to most positive.
  • 1 Measure for the Answers encoding. How many people gave each answer, usually a COUNT or a SUM.

Add Likert Chart to your worksheet

First, download the manifest file. It tells Tableau where to load the extension from.

Download likertchart.trex

Direct link: https://dataskera.com/downloads/likertchart.trex

Then, in Tableau:

  1. On the Marks card, open the Mark type dropdown, and under Viz Extensions choose Add Extension.
  2. In the Add an Extension dialog, choose Access Local Viz Extensions, then open the likertchart.trex file you just downloaded.
  3. When Tableau asks, allow the extension to access the data in the workbook.
  4. The welcome screen appears. Sign in with your Dataskera account, or on Tableau Desktop choose Use on Desktop without an account. See Signing in & access below.
  5. Build the chart: drag the question dimension onto Question, the response scale onto Response, and the count onto Answers. If the response field sorts alphabetically, type the scale order in the General tab.
Tableau Server or Cloud:
A site admin must allow the extension by adding its URL to the site's safe list, and the view needs the Download Summary Data permission. Extension URL: https://vizextension.dataskera.com/likertchart/likertchart.html

Signing in & access

Likert Chart is free. Whether you need to sign in depends only on what you are doing. Viewing a dashboard never asks for an account, and authoring is free too.

Viewing a dashboard
No account

People who only view a dashboard are never asked to sign in and are never blocked.

Editing on Tableau Desktop
Optional

Sign in, or continue without an account in a single click.

Editing on Server or Cloud
Free account

Sign in with your Dataskera account to author on the web.

No account yet? Create one free in under a minute. No credit card required.

Format panel

Open the Format panel from the extension menu to customize the chart. It is for the dashboard author and is not shown to viewers. It has four tabs:

  • The Scale: the response order, how the middle answer of an odd scale is treated, and the question order.
  • Bars: bar thickness, row gap, the percentage axis and the centre line.
  • Scale Colours: the two ends and the middle of the diverging ramp.
  • Labels and Summary: what each segment label shows and how small a segment can be before it is left unlabelled, the agreement and disagreement totals beside each bar, and the respondent count.
  • Color: a palette, a precise colour per category, and the overall opacity.
  • Legend: show or hide it, its position around the chart, an optional show/hide toggle for viewers, the colour swatch, and the content of each entry.
  • Tooltip: show or hide it, its colours, decimals, and a template you write yourself from the placeholders the chart provides.
The middle answer is your call, and it is stated:
Split it and half sits each side, so the centre line means half the answers lie to the left. Keep it right and the centre separates disagreement from everything else. Leave it out and every share is rebased on the people who took a side. There is no reading that is right for every survey, so the chart says which one it took.
Colours follow the scale, not the alphabet:
A shared colour map sorts its keys before handing out palette colours, which puts Agree first and Strongly disagree fourth and gives a five point scale five unrelated hues. The scale gets its own diverging ramp built on its own order; a colour set for one response in the Color tab still wins.
The order is yours to fix:
Tableau delivers a survey scale alphabetically unless the field is sorted. Type the order and it is used; anything you do not list keeps its place at the end, so a typo cannot make a response disappear.
A short bar is not a small sample:
Questions are rarely answered by the same number of people. The bars are shares, so the respondent count sits beside each one and the chart says when the counts differ.