How to Create an Editable PowerPoint Snake Chart

This article describes how to go from a crosstab table in Displayr...

...to an editable PowerPoint snake chart:
Note: you can create a Snake chart in Displayr (Visualization > Line > Snake with Tests) and export it to PowerPoint as an image. PowerPoint doesn't support a Snake Chart type output. Nevertheless, this type of output is often used in reporting. Researchers have found a workaround involving restructuring the data and charting it as a Scatter plot. This article contains the steps to automate the process. 

Method

1. Create a crosstab selecting the question you wish to show as lines in Columns (age in the table above).
2. From the toolbar, go to Calculation > Custom Code and draw an output on the Page. 
3. Update and input the below code into the R Code editor. You must update the table name in row 2 of the code. You can find the table's name by selecting the table and selecting Copy > Copy Name from Tools . 
   

   #specify table
   thetab=table.Income.by.Age
   
   #load reshape
   library(reshape2)
   
   #remove nets
   thetab=thetab[rownames(thetab) != "NET",colnames(thetab) != "NET" ]
   
   #melt the table to long format 
   thetab.m=melt(thetab)
   
   #create a similar table for the axes
   axis.m=thetab.m
   
   #change the values to the sequential axis values based on how many columns were melted
   axis.m[,"value"]=seq(NROW(axis.m)/length(unique(axis.m$Var2)),1,-1)
   
   #merge the two long data together
   merged=Cbind(thetab.m,axis.m)
   
   #make the data wide keeping pcts long but axis values into individual columns
   wide = dcast(merged, thetab.m.Var2 + thetab.m.Var1 + thetab.m.value ~ axis.m.Var2, value.var="axis.m.value")
   
   #remove the unneeded column names 
   wide.2 = wide[,!colnames(wide) %in% c("thetab.m.Var2")]
   wide.2[,-1]

4. The above code will reformat the table into the correct format for the desired chart type. 
   
5. Select the output, go to Appearance > Powerpoint Export > Format, and select Microsoft Chart.
6. Set Export as to XY Scatter Lines (or another Scatter type). 
   
7. Go to Share > Export Pages > PowerPoint > Create New Document > Export. 
8. Open the exported file in PowerPoint and re-format the chart. 

Next

Exporting and Updating PowerPoint Reports Video Series

How to Retrospectively Link PowerPoint Tables and Charts to Displayr Outputs

How to Update an Existing PowerPoint Document