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 click on the Page to place the output.

3. Update and input the code below 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 going to General > General > Name in the object inspector .

   #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. In the object inspector , select the output, go to Appearance > PowerPoint Export > Format, and select Microsoft Chart.
6. Set Export as to X Y Scatter Lines (or another Scatter type). 
   
7. Go to Share > Export Report > PowerPoint > Create New Document > Export. 
8. Open the exported file in PowerPoint and reformat 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