Dapresy is introducing a new series of articles, prepared by Daniel Landelius, Customer Support Specialist, which focuses on report building for efficiency. The series highlights different functions in the system and how to best utilize them when setting up your project. The ultimate goal is for you, the project administrator, to save time and cut down manual work.

This is the third (and last) in a series of articles addressing how to build your PowerPoint report efficiently. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the series.) In this article, we focus on the base size. The function we’re going over is also useful to admins when building reports. Using this function, you can make sure that your text style matches that of your base numbers when you filter your charts and tables.

Where is the base size found?

For a quick reminder – here is the base size, marked on a slide we’ve used in the previous articles:

The Problem

If you’ve built a slide like the one above, you know that quite often, administrators are using two objects to show the base size as marked in red. One object is a text box with “Base Size:” written out, while the other is a table pulling the number. The result looks like this:

In addition to the hassle of creating two objects, this approach also presents a problem visually. Since the base size value changes from filter to filter, the numbers in this base may differ. Sometimes there’s extra space between the text and numbers (as demonstrated in the image below), or misaligned positioning on each slide – not very desirable. What’s worse, you often spend time tinkering these small text boxes and tables trying to get them aligned, yet somehow, they always manage to misalign.

The Solution

In part 2 of this series, we learned how to put the base size as an object in the background. This saves us from the tedious task of adding this object to each slide manually. Now, let’s go over how to add the base size in a single object, ensuring that it always looks good.

STEP 1

First, we need to pick a variable that all of our respondents have provided an answer for. This way, we will make sure that all of our respondents are included. Usually, any demographic question works. In our example, we use the gender question.

To start, we’ve made a grouped answer called “ALL”. By the way, if you prefer to use a compute instead of a grouped answer, that also works. Just make sure that all your respondents are included in one answer alternative.

STEP 2

After we’ve set up our question with one answer that includes all respondents, we open a table and prepare the setup by doing the following:

1. 1. Set our table to Count – Categorical question under Filtering
2. 2. Find our question (Gender) and select our alternative (ALL)
3. 3. Hide all labels so we’re only showing the value
4. 4. Design our layout based on our preference

The result looks like this:

STEP 3

Now, we want to add our text and decide if our value should show the base size with or without weight.

To turn off the weight, we go to Settings then Calculation and switch off the Use weight function.

STEP 4

In our last step, we’ll add the text by going to Settings. Under Text, we write “Base size: ” under Unit.

TIP: Add a space after the colon to create space between the text and displayed value.

We’re now done and have created an object that has the text and value perfectly aligned no matter where we put it on our slide or dashboard.

This concludes our article series on how to set up functions in the background of your slides. In our next series, we will focus on the “Factor average” function, and how you can use it to create NPS values or create more advanced benchmarking in your dashboards.

This series of articles will try to reveal hidden gems and shortcuts you can use within the system to make your reporting really stand out! If you have any questions, feedback or ideas on topics you’d like for us to cover, please don’t hesitate to email Daniel directly at daniel.landelius@dapresy.com.