You are right. You can achieve this using the dashboard. You can combine text fields from different surveys and analyze the comments.

Thanks for the input - I am wanting to combine all the verbatim questions into one data field for searching purpose - this is what I am unclear how to do?

Hi ​@ccarroll 

I think what you have in mind could be achieved by building a kind of pivot/stacked dataset in which each row would contain a verbatim and information about its origin.

In each survey, you could build daily workflows to extract the survey responses and use a basic transform task to create unique IDs (could be concat responseId + question, for example) and to uniformize the fields’ names. You could then load the results into an IDP.

The initial setup would be a bit heavy since you would need one such workflow for each of your 5 open ended questions for each of your 20 surveys, bit in the end you would end up with an IDP containing rows similar to this:

But with dashboard mapping it will combine open end from all surveys in on field that can be used for search purpose.