Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel

Create dynamic Word Clouds / Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel

Unlike Tableau Software, Microsoft Excel provides no native feature to create a word cloud (aka tag cloud), i.e. a visual representation of text data where the font size of a word depicts the frequency of this word in a text.

Workarounds for creating word clouds in Microsoft Excel are available for free, some of them for almost 10 years already.

I also made my contribution with the article Wordle Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel in 2010. All of the workarounds come with some considerable limitations and mine is probably the worst: it requires an Internet connection, needs another click in the webbrowser control and – worst of all – it doesn’t work anymore with Excel 2013, because Microsoft disabled scriptable ActiveX controls on worksheets in Office 2013.

I am fully aware of the fact that word clouds are a very poor tool for data analysis and business data visualizations. However, they definitely have their place in infographics. Moreover, realizing a word cloud in Excel is an interesting VBA challenge.

Hence, I decided to create another workaround for word clouds in Microsoft Excel.

Today’s article introduces my new implementation of word clouds in Excel including the workbook(s) for free download. I will go into the details of my approach in a follow-up post.