Best Practices for Handling Large Survey Data

[ragedaeixdeal]

My data has a column for each demographic question, each survey question, and multiple choice survey questions have repeat columns due to multi-select. I have tried two approaches:

I unpivoted all my data and worked on it that way. This made it difficult to filter by demographics.

I unpivoted all columns but demographic, but still having trouble with quantifying demographic data for some reason (count of observations doesn't match what I know the count is supposed to be based on my excel file.).

Any advice? Do I need to spend more time setting up my survey data?

Thank you!