closer (sort of). yes I did misunderstand what was used for the category axis.
but correcting that hasn't helped, to be honest. setting CategoryAxis to "id" didn't improve it however, if I leave out the horizontalAxis and CategoryAxis completely, it'll fall back to the default of displaying an index - it provides the correct amount of them so it *is* reading the XML. here's a node of the proper XML: rating="5" should be the height of the column <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <questionaire> <question id="1" title="title here" category="category here" text="1. How would you rate your teamwork project as a theoretical or real world application?" min_label="Theoretical" max_label="Real World" center_label="" protocol_num="1" summary_num="1.1" min_value="-5" max_value="5" weighting="0" rating="5" />