How to Create a Diverging Bar Chart in Google Slides for Likert Scale Surveys

February 9, 2026

If I see one more pie chart used to visualize a 5-point Likert scale, I might scream.

You know the drill. You've just wrapped up a massive employee engagement survey or a customer satisfaction deep dive. You have thousands of rows of data ranging from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree." You paste that into a standard slide deck, and what do you get? A clutter of unreadable columns or, worse, five different pie charts that make comparison impossible.

The gold standard for this kind of data is the Diverging Bar Chart.

It aligns all your responses along a central vertical axis. "Neutral" sits in the middle, negative sentiment flows to the left, and positive sentiment flows to the right. It tells a story instantly: is the room generally happy or unhappy?

The problem? Google Slides doesn't have a "Diverging Bar Chart" button. Native charts require you to open a linked Google Sheet, hack together invisible spacer segments, and pray the formatting doesn't break when you resize the window.

There is a better way. I use ExtraChart to build these because it handles the stacking and customization directly in the sidebar without the spreadsheet headache.

Here is how to build one.

The Theory: It's Just a Stacked Bar (With a Twist)

A diverging bar chart is technically just a Stacked Bar Chart where some values are negative and some are positive.

The "0" line becomes your anchor.

  • Negative values (Disagree, Strongly Disagree) go to the left of the zero.
  • Positive values (Agree, Strongly Agree) go to the right.

Step 1: Fire Up the Editor

First, open your presentation. If you haven't installed ExtraChart yet, grab it from the marketplace. Go to Extensions -> ExtraChart -> Create & Edit Charts.

In the sidebar, you'll see the list of 20 chart types. You want to select the Stacked Bar Chart icon.

Sidebar menu: Selecting the Stacked Bar Chart icon

Step 2: The Data Trick

Once the popup editor opens, switch to the Data tab. This is where ExtraChart beats the native tool—you can edit this grid like a mini-spreadsheet right there on your screen, and the preview updates instantly.

For a standard Likert scale, structure your data like this:

  1. Categories (Rows): These are your questions (e.g., "I feel valued," "I like the coffee").
  2. Series (Columns): These are your sentiment levels.

Here is the secret sauce: To get that diverging look, enter your "Disagree" values as negative numbers.

  • Strongly Disagree: -20
  • Disagree: -10
  • Neutral: 5 (or split it, but let's keep it simple)
  • Agree: 10
  • Strongly Agree: 20

As soon as you type the negative signs, ExtraChart's engine automatically pushes those bars to the left of the Y-axis. The positive numbers shoot to the right. You now have a diverging structure.

Step 3: Color Coding (The Make or Break)

A diverging chart only works if the colors make sense. You don't want random rainbows here.

Go to the Settings tab. You need a bi-polar color palette.

  • Assign Red/Orange hues to the negative series (Strongly Disagree, Disagree).
  • Assign Gray to Neutral.
  • Assign Blue/Green hues to the positive series (Agree, Strongly Agree).

In the native Google Slides tool, changing these colors requires clicking individual bars and hoping you selected the right series. In ExtraChart, you just use the Color Palette Manager to assign hex codes to specific series instantly. You can even save this palette as "Survey Brand Theme" to use on the next 50 slides.

Step 4: Clean Up the Labels

Since we used negative numbers to force the layout, the axis labels might show "-20%". That looks messy for a final report.

In the Settings tab under Axes, you can customize the label formatting. Or, cleaner yet, toggle the axis labels off entirely and turn on Data Labels inside the bars.

Pro Tip: ExtraChart allows you to control the typography of these labels. White text on dark red/blue bars is usually the most readable combo.

Step 5: Insert and Relax

Click Create. ExtraChart inserts the visualization as a high-resolution image.

Why is this better than the native chart? Because when your boss asks you to change the font from Arial to Roboto or update the data for Q3, you don't have to hunt for the source spreadsheet. You just select the chart on the slide, open ExtraChart, and the data is right there in the sidebar, ready to edit.

Surveys are hard enough to conduct. Visualizing them shouldn't be.