Grouping Columns

AddMaple supports grouping columns with overlapping categories, which is especially useful for aligning data across similar questions. This grouping often happens automatically for opinion scales, but you can also manage it manually when needed.

This example demonstrates grouping three different "mention" columns. After cleaning the data in AddMaple by merging similar mentions, we'll now show you how to group these columns together so you can explore the grouped totals.

Here are the three "mention" columns. While they are not identical, you can see that they contain similar categories.

1

Three similar mention columns ready to be grouped.

First, expand one of the columns you want to group. Then, click the More menu and select "Group Columns."

2

Open the More menu and choose Group Columns.

A dropdown will appear in the sentence builder, allowing you to select the columns you'd like to group together. Only columns with overlapping categories will be displayed as options.

3

Select columns with overlapping categories to include in the group.

Often, you'll have more categories than grouped columns. In such cases, it's often more effective to swap the columns and rows. You can easily do this by toggling the "Swap Columns and Rows" option on the left side of the pivot chart.

In this example, swapping the columns and rows allows you to see the artists mentioned across all three grouped columns, ordered by the total mentions.

4

Toggle Swap Columns and Rows to compare values across grouped columns.