Introduction to Reports: Building Dashboards From Your Survey Data (2026)

Getting Started
Tutorial
Updated Sep 02, 2026

Raw survey responses and a dashboard someone can actually glance at and understand are two very different things, and the gap between them is normally where a decent chunk of project time goes - exporting to a spreadsheet, building charts by hand, formatting something presentable. Reports is built to shrink that gap. It takes your survey's response data and turns it into a dashboard you can customize and share, starting from something usable rather than a blank canvas.

Starting From a Real Dashboard, Not a Blank Page

Creating a report starts with picking the survey it's based on and giving it a title. From there, a starter dashboard gets generated automatically, already populated with a sensible chart for each of your survey's questions - so you're reviewing and adjusting a real first draft rather than deciding from scratch how every single question should be visualized.

Customizing What You See

From that starting point, the dashboard is yours to shape. Add, remove, or duplicate individual chart widgets, change what chart type any given widget uses, apply filters to narrow down what a chart is actually showing, and set up cross-tabulations - breaking one question's results down by another question or by a respondent segment, so you can see how satisfaction differs by region or how feature usage differs by plan tier, for instance, without leaving the dashboard to go build that comparison somewhere else.

There's a genuinely wide range of chart types available, covering most of what a survey question would call for: bar and column charts (including stacked and 100%-stacked variants for comparing composition), line charts for anything trend-based, scatter plots, doughnut and pie charts, polar area charts, lollipop charts, waterfall charts, and treemaps. Picking the right one for a given question is mostly about matching the chart to what you're trying to show - composition, trend, distribution, comparison - the same judgment call you'd make in any charting tool, just with more relevant options on hand than a generic spreadsheet would offer.

Getting It in Front of People

Once a report looks right, it can be shared through a public link - optionally password-protected, or set to require the viewer to log in, with the option to show or hide your identity as the report's creator depending on how you want it to read. For anything that needs to leave the platform entirely, both individual widgets and the full dashboard export to PowerPoint, ready to drop into a slide deck without rebuilding anything by hand.

Existing reports are organized by the survey they're based on, and each one shows basic activity information - how many times it's been viewed and when it was last updated - so keeping track of what's current and what's stale doesn't require opening every report individually to check.

FAQ

Do I have to build the dashboard from scratch?
No - every new report starts with an auto-generated set of default charts based on your survey's questions, which you then adjust rather than build from nothing.

Can I compare results across different segments?
Yes - cross-tabulation lets you break one question's results down by another question or by a respondent segment directly inside the dashboard.

How do I share a report with someone outside Opionate?
Through a shareable public link, which can be password-protected or set to require login depending on how controlled you want access to be.

Can I get a report into a slide deck?
Yes - both individual chart widgets and the full dashboard export to PowerPoint.

Can I have more than one report for the same survey?
Yes - reports are grouped by the survey they're based on, and you can create, duplicate, or delete them independently.


Ready to try it? Create your first report on Opionate and turn your survey data into a shareable dashboard.

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