Export the data from the survey into a .xls file (it’s a lot easier if you can export the data into a template 

). I like to have a tab for each question to keep things neat.

Go through the responses and understand what your “response categories’ are. For this question, the categories I saw in the responses were team, solo, company-wide, team & company, and the team is company. You’ll want to add each category to the top of a separate column.

Go through and sort the individual responses. You’ll want to place a “1” in each cell where the response matches the column. For example, the first respondent said the decision was made by “the team,” so I put a “1” in the “Team” column.

As you’re going through, if you find something that needs a new category, add it.

After you’ve gone through this process, you can decide to re-order or combine the categories/columns if you think it makes sense. For example, I like to re-order them based on the number of respondents in each category. Just make sure that you don’t lose any “1”s if you combine columns.

Then, it’s really easy to create tables and bar charts summarizing your data!

Mike Fiorillo

When working with the team at Clubhouse, I used this analysis to process open-text survey data about the user onboarding experience.

Customer survey open-text analysis for Clubhouse

Customer survey open-text analysis for Clubhouse

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