Group survey questions and variables by topic, and a long dashboard turns into a set of focused sections instead of one wall of data. Groups is the feature that does this: set your sections up once, and every export from then on can pull just the one you need.
Why One Long Dashboard Gets Hard to Use
A single project can hold dozens of questions and variables. An employee survey might touch leadership, workload, and development all in one place. A brand tracker might cover five or six competitors.
Without any structure, every export means scrolling through everything to find the handful of items that matter for this one meeting. Grouping related items together is a common recommendation in dashboard reporting generally, and it applies just as much to survey dashboards as any other kind.
How to Group Survey Questions and Variables
Setting one up takes a few clicks in the Dashboard tab.
● Click the three dots (···) next to any variable or question
● Select Groups from the menu
● Click Add new group and name it, for example Leadership or Work Environment
● Repeat Add to group for every question or variable that belongs there
Once a group exists, it shows up in the dropdown next to your report name. Switch between groups instantly, reorder them with Move, or rename and delete them through Edit.
Sharing One Group With the Right Person
Group the questions that belong together, then export just that group when you need to. Nobody has to send anything automatically. You choose which group to pull each time you export to PPT or Excel.
That’s useful in a few different ways. Maybe you want one presentation built entirely around one group and a separate presentation for another. Maybe you just want an Excel file with a specific set of questions, without everything else from the project cluttering it up.
The Leadership group becomes one PPT. The Work Environment group becomes another, or just the sheet you actually need in Excel. Either way, the full project stays in one place, but you’re not stuck exporting all of it every time.
One thing worth being precise about: this splits questions into sets you can pull individually. It’s not a comparison tool. If what you actually want is to compare scores across departments, roles, or regions in a single chart, that’s a different tool called Breakdown, found under the same three-dot menu. Groups organizes questions and variables. Breakdown compares segments. They solve different problems and often get used together.
How to Group Survey Questions by Market
Groups also helps when a study has both shared and market-specific questions. Say a customer satisfaction survey runs across Sweden, Germany, and the UK in one project.
Most questions are the same everywhere: overall satisfaction, NPS, a few service questions. That’s the core set, asked to every respondent. But Sweden has two extra questions about a loyalty program that only exists there, shown to Swedish respondents through a condition. Germany has one extra question about a local competitor.
Set up three groups: Core, Sweden Extra, and Germany Extra. Export Core plus Sweden Extra for the Swedish team. Export Core plus Germany Extra for the German team. Nobody gets a deck full of questions from a market they don’t operate in, and there’s no need to build three separate projects to get there.
Where Rule-Based Reporting Fits
Groups decides which questions belong together. Rule-based reporting decides how each one gets visualized once you export, matching chart types to question types automatically instead of an analyst mapping each slide by hand.
The two work together: Groups controls what’s in the export, rule-based reporting controls how it looks. We go deeper on the rule-based side in our post on automated ad hoc survey reports.
FAQ
How do I group survey questions and variables?
Use the Groups feature in the Dashboard tab. Select Groups from the three-dot menu next to a question or variable, create a new group, and add related items to it.
Is grouping questions the same as comparing results by department?
No. Groups organizes questions and variables together. Comparing results across departments, roles, or regions uses Breakdown, a separate feature.
Can I export just one group instead of the whole report?
Yes. Choose a single group or all groups when exporting to PPT or Excel.
Does this work for surveys that run across multiple markets?
Yes. A common setup groups shared core questions separately from market-specific ones, so each market’s team gets an export built just for them.
How many groups can I create in one project?
There’s no fixed limit.
Want to see how a grouped export looks in a finished deck? Browse our PowerPoint report templates and find a style that fits your project.