Introduction to survey charts

The Flourish Survey template is ideal for visualizing survey data in a clear and engaging way. Whether you’re working with responses from customer satisfaction surveys, employee feedback, or opinion polls, this template allows you to present results dynamically, turning static data into a compelling data story.

With powerful features like filtering, sorting, and support for multiple question types, it helps you bring your survey data to life, making insights more accessible to any audience. You can even animate dots into different views — like groups, bars, or even maps for geographic data.

Anatomy of a survey chart

The Flourish Survey template is perfect for exploring datasets where each row represents an individual respondent. In the visualization, each dot stands for one respondent and can be grouped or colored based on their answers.

With an intuitive settings panel, users can easily interact with the data — applying filters, selecting specific survey questions, and switching between different views. This makes it easy to explore the survey results in depth.

Flourish survey chart

With Flourish, creating a survey chart is simple and free — just upload your spreadsheet, and you’re ready to go.

You can visualize your data using dots, squares, or even custom shapes, and create everything from scaled circles to waffle charts.

Customize your chart further by adding custom popups or adjusting the size and color of your dots.

The template also allows you to load multiple survey questions, letting users toggle between them for a smooth, interactive experience. Whether you’re grouping, sizing, or shading data by different variables — or even placing the data points on a map — you can efficiently summarize large datasets and include user-facing controls for deeper exploration.

The template also gives you the flexibility to manipulate your raw data, using built-in settings to group questions, reorder categories, or customize labels. If you’re mapping data, you can even add a custom base map.

But the true power of the survey template shines when you bring it into a Flourish story — guiding your audience through the data and setting up different views to highlight key insights.

Creative uses of the Survey template

Besides visualizing survey data, the template can also be used for all kinds of data types. Explore the examples below.

Data structure for a survey chart

In Flourish, you can easily create scatter plots without coding – all you need to do is upload a CSV or an Excel sheet with your data.

Each row in your file should represent an individual or entity you want to visualize, while the questions or attributes should be organized into columns. You can easily specify the type of data in each column.

For columns with text-based answers (like A-C gender or favorite animal), set them as “Categorical columns.” These will appear in the “Group by,” “Shade by,” and “Compare” options in your chart.

For columns with numerical data (like D-E height or age), set them as “Continuous columns.” These will be available in the “Size by” option, allowing you to scale your data points accordingly.

The Survey template is ideal for datasets up to 10,000 rows. Larger datasets will work, but perform more slowly.

Resources

Here are some resources to help you get started with survey charts:

• Visualize survey data with Flourish
  
• Survey – an overview
  
• 5 ways to effectively visualize survey responses
  
• How to create a Flourish story with the Survey template