How to Hide and Remove Categories (Missing Values)

Introduction

There are different ways of removing categories from tables and each has a different consequence. This article describes how to hide and remove categories from tables.

Requirements

A Q project with tables created from Pick One, Pick One - Multi or Pick Any questions.

Method

Removing categories and setting values as missing

Right-clicking on a category of a Pick One or Pick One - Multi table and select Remove simultaneously hides the category and recomputes the percentages in the table (i.e., if it is categorical data, the percentages are re-based).

You can undo these changes by pressing undo or by right-clicking on the table and selecting Revert.

When categories are mutually exclusive (i.e., from a Pick One or Pick One - Multi question) you can also right-click on rows or columns and select Values to open the Value Attributes dialogue box and change the selections in the Missing Data column. This is identical to using the Remove option described above.

Re-basing multiple response (Pick Any) questions

When using Remove with a Pick Any question, you will sometimes see the NET drop below 100%. This is because some respondents will not have selected any of the responses in the question. One solution to this is to create a filter based on the NET and apply it to the table. This will ensure that the NET will be 100%. You can do this by right-clicking on the percentage in the NET row and selecting Create filter. Ensure that Apply filter to the current table checkbox is selected and press OK.

Hiding categories

You can also right-click on a category in a table and select Hide to prevent it from being shown in the table. When you hide a category in this way, no change is made to the other values on the table. You can undo hiding by pressing undo, or, right-clicking and selecting Revert (which returns the question to its original state).

You can also hide rows/columns where the first statistic is 0% or NaN in every cell of the row/column by pressing the Hide empty rows/columns icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen.