“They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
Guess what? A word cloud with a hundred words is enough. We’re sure you’ve seen these charts everywhere, including business settings. A word cloud is a visual representation of text data. You can create this chart with just text.
This blog will show some examples of how to create word clouds. So keep reading to avoid missing valuable tips.
A picture speaks a thousand words. But when that image is made up of about a hundred words, it becomes super effective. You can use Word Cloud visualizations to create engaging data stories for your audience. This is because they are incredibly easy to read and understand.
You can use word cloud charts to visualize various data, from customer and employee surveys to keyword analysis.
In this blog, we’ve compiled valuable tips and strategies that you can use to create easy-to-read word cloud charts for your data stories. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use this visualization to stay ahead of your competitors. We’ll discuss the following in this blog:
The definition of a word cloud chart
The uses of word clouds
Why create word clouds?
The best word cloud generators
How to create a word cloud chart? Using examples to complete a step-by-step guide
These tips and strategies have been tested and validated by thousands of experienced data visualization experts worldwide.
So you won’t waste your time reading all the content of this blog.
What is a Word Cloud Chart?
Definition: A word cloud, also known as a tag cloud or text cloud, is a collection of words of different sizes, colors, and orientations.
So how do you read this chart?
The more frequently a word appears in the source text, the larger and more important it appears. You can use word cloud images in multiple scenarios. For example, if you’re a content writer, you need to create a word cloud to identify overused search terms to boost your SEO ranking.
This visualization breaks down massive text data into high-level insights. Essentially, the bigger the words in the cloud, the higher the frequency of their use.
Word cloud charts are a well-established visualization that can attract, educate, and quickly capture the audience’s attention. Additionally, it allows the audience to quickly assess which text is the most popular.
One of the most appealing features of word cloud charts is that they effortlessly provide insight from large amounts of data. So you don’t have to spend time counting or reading text notes to find answers.
Now that you’re familiar with word clouds, let’s look at their benefits. Why is this visualization important to you?
How to Create a Word Cloud Chart? A Step-by-Step Guide with Examples
Examples are the best way to understand how to create charts. The following Word Cloud examples will help you see how you can create this chart with just a few clicks, without any coding required.
Suppose you’ve hired a transcriber to decode audio interviews into written narratives. Let’s use the table data below for our scenario.
Count is the frequency with which hotel guests mention specific words in a specific context.
Label
Count
Staff
1240
Restaurant
576
Excellent
1133
Crowded
571
Comfortable
756
Information
897
Carpet
1052
Distance
1254
Reception
859
Clean
377
Unfriendly
493
Wi-Fi
1769
Parking
984
Best
426
Dirty
1055
And much more…
Now have the data prepared in a worksheet and choose a word cloud chart from the list.
Now select the worksheet name (where the data is stored).
Click on the Add new metric and select the column with numerical values (Count).
Click on the Add new dimension button and choose the column containing text data (Label).
Click on create chart.
View the generated word cloud chart.
Insights
Address cleanliness issues to avoid customer attrition. You need to find out why customers use the words dirty and carpet to describe the hotel brand’s cleanliness level.
Parking issues need to be addressed by hiring more valets to alleviate congestion and reduce guest waiting times.
The professionalism of the hotel’s reception and staff seems to be pleasing to hotel guests. Additionally, guests find staff members providing information. It is necessary to further strengthen this strength.
There appears to be positive feedback about the utensils and decor in the lobby, which may be well received by guests.
What are the Uses of Word Clouds?
Here are a few ways word clouds can be used.
Visualize Survey Results
You can use a word cloud chart to visualize frequently occurring words in survey data. In other words, it’s one of the quickest ways to get advanced insights from survey results.
For example, you can use this chart to visualize the words used by the target market to describe your brand. Repetitive negative opinions and emotions related to your brand are not a good sign.
Additionally, it serves as a cue that action needs to be taken before things get out of hand.
Next time you conduct a survey to create a data story, use a word cloud chart. You’ll be amazed at the advanced insights you can discover using this cutting-edge visualization.
Competitor Keyword Research
One of the smartest uses of word clouds is to monitor your competition’s SEO game. Just copy all text information from their website and visualize it with a word cloud chart.
Ideally, the most frequently occurring words are the keywords you should consider based on their performance.
If the keywords are already effective for your competition, why not use them too?
There are tools with word cloud charts designed to separate noise from your data, such as emojis, punctuation, etc. Next time you want to monitor your competitor’s search engine optimization (SEO) game, use a word cloud.
Content Creation
Every content writer has words they like to use repeatedly.
It can be challenging to see the words you’ve used repeatedly when editing your text. Remember, overusing certain words can make your entire content sound redundant.
This is where word cloud charts come in handy to help you identify redundant words in your content. The chart highlights the most frequently used words by size and color. It’s very easy to spot repeated words in your content without wasting time or sweating.
Do you have too many dialogue tags in your writing?
If so, the word “said” will show up as a larger word. Are your characters constantly laughing or shrugging? A word cloud chart can help you find the actions you repeat frequently.
Using this chart ensures that you focus on the right characters, themes, and plot points.
For example, if your content is about Jane, but Jack’s name is three times larger in your word cloud, you may need to reassess all of your content. If you’re planning content about war but the words “battle” and “fight” are small on your word cloud, you need to develop that plot further.
Word cloud charts have a special place for copywriters and bloggers. Why?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is indeed the bane of copywriters and bloggers everywhere. This is because algorithms are constantly changing. But with a word cloud chart, SEO doesn’t have to be a mystery. Remember, the most crucial part of search engine optimization is keywords.
Yes, the words people input into search engines when they need or want something. Run your copy or blog posts through a Word Cloud tool.
Are your target keywords large or small?
Which words did you inadvertently turn into SEO keywords? This chart can help you accurately identify which edits need to be made to improve search engine rankings and resonate more with your target market.
Employee Sentiments
How do you handle the responses when you ask employees to share their feedback and opinions on the workplace?
Remember, it’s challenging to transform unstructured data into actionable insights if you don’t know where to start.
This is where word cloud charts come in. If you can see which issues your employees frequently discuss, you can make valuable and meaningful changes that can:
Boost morale
Strengthen company culture
Improve performance
Discovering Technical Terms
How do you present highly technical research results to a non-technical audience (e.g., the board)?
You guessed it.
You should create data stories or presentations without jargon. How do you find and eliminate jargon from data stories or presentations without losing the essence? Use word cloud charts to separate jargon that may confuse your audience and make your data narrative ineffective.
Why Create Word Clouds?
Data visualization (such as charts, graphs, infographics, etc.) provides you with a valuable medium to convey important information at a glance.
But what if your raw data is text-based?
If you want a stunning visual format to highlight important text data points easily, use a word cloud chart. It can make dull data come to life and immediately convey important insights.
If you’re staring at bulky data or long pages of text with confusion, you can make connections.
With so many insights to understand, how do you know where to start?
Word cloud charts can help simplify this process. If you’ve ever looked at a bunch of seemingly unrelated words that don’t make sense until you investigate further: you know the benefits of this chart.
Let’s look at how best to deploy this visualization to uncover deeper insights from your data.
Discover patterns in text data
Charts, graphs, and other data visualizations can help you identify key patterns. However, extracting these same insights from qualitative data is at best troublesome and, at worst, impossible.
Word cloud generators make this process easy. In this chart, you see the words that stand out among the rest as your key points and recurring themes.
Enhance your content creation strategy
This chart can help you identify redundant words that disrupt the flow and impact of your writing. Additionally, you can easily understand if your content is consistent with your target themes, subjects, and most relevant keywords.
Easily discover pain points of your target market
Word cloud charts can help you find out the pain points of your customers. If you collect feedback from customers, use their language to create a word cloud to determine what content is most important to them.
For example, if the word cloud highlights “long wait times,” then that’s a pain point for your target market.
Eliminate jargon from text for smooth and engaging communication
If you’re a B2C content marketer, this chart can help in refining your sales pitch by highlighting technical terms. Using this chart ensures that your language is easy to understand, grasp, and resonate with your target market.
Essentially, if you want a visualization that can easily provide clear information for your data story, use a word cloud chart.
So far, you’ve learned about Word Clouds and their applications, most importantly, why you should use them for your data story.
Now let’s get into the practical part of the blog: the actual tools to generate this chart.
What is the Best Word Cloud Generator?
Let’s talk about Google Sheets because it’s one of the most commonly used data analysis and data visualization tools apart from Excel.
This spreadsheet application is top-notch because it’s easy to use. Plus, it has been around for years, so almost everyone using data is familiar with it.
So how can you create an easy-to-read and understandable word cloud chart in Google Sheets?
Remember, to make your data story appealing to your target audience, it should have clear charts. You don’t want critical insights to be overshadowed by unnecessary things like heavy colors.
Well, Google Sheets doesn’t have a template for Word Clouds. We know this can be very disappointing, but it’s the reality. So, if you have a lot of text information from surveys or competitor blogs, Google Sheets is not the preferred tool.
So, what’s the solution?
The solution is not to give up on Google Sheets. No, we’re not advocating for you to abandon your trusted spreadsheet tool.
You just need to power it up with an add-on to make it a reliable partner for data visualization.
Google is well aware that it’s impossible to cater to all your data visualization needs. That’s why they came up with a store where you can access third-party plugins to easily complete various professional tasks.
Well, there’s a reliable and very easy-to-use add-on called ChartExpo. It’s packed with Word Cloud templates and over 50 cutting-edge charts.
What is ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is a cloud-hosted plugin that converts your Google Sheets into a responsive data visualization tool.
Wait! That’s not all.
This affordable data visualization tool comes packed with over 50 chart templates, allowing you to choose a wider range of visual effects. With ChartExpo, you don’t need to know coding or programming. Yes, it’s that easy to use.
So when you plan your data stories, make sure you have a reliable data visualization partner by your side. ChartExpo gives you the freedom to customize your Word Cloud chart to match seamlessly with your data narrative.
Just remember that you can highlight key insights you want your audience to easily grasp. With just a few clicks, you can access a Word Cloud chart that seamlessly fits with your data narrative.
Let’s dive into the essential part of the blog: a practice section where you can put what you’ve learned into action.
How to Install ChartExpo in Google Sheets for Free Access to Word Cloud Charts
You need to install the ChartExpo add-on for Google Sheets.
Then follow these simple steps:
Open your Google Sheets desktop app.
Open a worksheet and click on the Add-ons menu.
You’ll see the “ChartExpo” option in the dropdown menu.
Click on “ChartExpo” to install your plugin.
If prompted, click the “Refresh” button.
Select the ChartExpo plugin again and click the “Insert” button.
The plugin will be added to your Google Sheets app, as shown in the screenshot below.
You will see an extensive library of visualization charts divided into 6 different groups.
Click on the PPC Charts tab, as shown below.
After clicking on the PPC Charts tab, you will see all the charts, with the Word Cloud Chart being one of them.
Practical Use of Word Cloud Charts
Imagine you’ve just surveyed a hotel brand.
You’ve conducted personal interviews and recorded hotel guests’ opinions on various key areas of the brand’s awareness, including:
Staff
Restaurant
Customer service
Bar
Cleanliness
Hotel facilities
Overall ambiance, and more.
What are the Benefits of Using Word Clouds?
ChartExpo (an add-on for Google Sheets) is an interactive word cloud generator designed to highlight key words that occur most frequently without using excessive coloring. Unlike other tools, you don’t need to write python code to access easily readable and interpretable word cloud charts.
Furthermore, this easy-to-use word cloud template automatically detects pairs (words that often occur together) in sentences, paragraphs, and documents, providing you with more context than other word cloud tools.
You’re completely free to customize and edit your word cloud chart to be consistent with your data story. Yes, you heard that right. More importantly, you can customize fonts, layout, and colors with ease.
Finally, it has a super cool interface to help you discover the most frequent and profitable keywords hoarded by your competitors.
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