Word cloud – an overview

What is it for?

This template allows you to create an impressive visualization of the most common words in a piece of text.

How to get started

First comes the text input itself. Through the Text input settings of the Words options you are able to choose to paste in raw text. Note that this may be simple but can prove a bit slow for large amounts of text.

The other option would be to use a CSV or Excel spreadsheet of word frequencies via the Data sheet. You might want to do this because it's possible to color by a category with this approach, while it isn't with the Paste in raw text option. Switch the Text input setting to Data sheet and then upload your spreadsheet (either as an .XLSX or .CSV file). It should have a column for words, a column for their frequency, and a column for a category to color them by, where applicable.

TIP: You can use free resources such as writewords.org.uk to determine word frequency in a text.

If you wish to exclude some words, you can enter them in the Exclusions box of the Words settings after you enable it. By default, the word cloud will not show the 100 most common words in English, like "the" and "if". If you wish to show some of them, remove them from the box where they are filled by default.

The Word limit option controls the maximum number of words to be visualized.

Through the Cloud style options, you can choose between different fonts, increase the spacing and also try different layouts through Layout number. You are also able to switch between linear scaling, logarithmic scaling, and scaling calculated as the square root of the count.

Through the Animation settings, you are able to switch between different styles of the animation produced when the visualization loads. Auto mode will use Grow when there are fewer than 100 words visible, Fade if there are fewer than 500, and None if there are 500 or more.

You can also add popups and panels to your word cloud. Here we have added column D to the "Info for popups", data binding. If you then go to the Popups and panels settings you can customise the style and text in your popup.