How to Combine Multiple Categories into a New Category

Displayr makes it super easy to combine categories from a variable set together into a new category. You can manually combine them on a table of the variable set directly. As a reminder, any modifications to how a variable set is shown on a table via the right-click menu are replicated in all tables of the variable set. This article describes how to go from a table containing multiple categories:

Table 1 Combine.png

To a table that merges selected categories to create a new category, both by adding an additional category (NET) to the table, as well as replacing the categories with a combined category:

Requirements

A data set with variables with a Structure of anything except Numeric (Numeric-Grid and Multi are ok) and Text/Text-Multi.
- Note for Nominal variables, the counts of the categories being merged are added together for the new category.
- For Binary - Multi variable sets, the new category will count respondents who selected any of the categories being merged.
Familiarity with the Relationship Between Value Attributes, Data Reductions, Variables, and Variable Sets

Method

Create a table by dragging a variable from the Data Sources tree onto the Page or Report tree.
Hold down your Ctrl key and select the row or column header for each of the categories that you want to combine. Below we've selected all the rows for Coke products.
Combine them while either showing or not showing the categories combined.
1. To add a new category to the table while showing the original categories, right-click the selected rows and select Create NET to add a new net category in addition to the original ones.
2. To combine categories into a single category without showing the ones combined, right-click the selected categories and select Combine to replace the categories with a new one.
OPTIONAL: Right-click the combined row and select Rename to rename the row label, such as Coke products, Pepsi products.

Additional notes

Changes made to categories on a table are made to the variable set's Data Reduction (or how the data is shown by default in tables). It is not reflected in the variable set's Value Attributes (accessed via the object inspector > Missing Data settings). This will still list all the categories in the original data unless renamed/recoded. You can save a copy of the dataset with the combined categories created using the Combine menu item via How to Make Merged Categories Appear in Targets When Weighting.