Clearly and Simply

Tag: word cloud

  • Word Clouds with Tableau

    How to create Word Clouds with Tableau and a look at the value of Word Clouds for serious Business Data Analysis

    Word Clouds vs AlternativesThe previous two posts (Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel and The Implementation of Word Clouds with Excel) provided and explained my VBA-based solution to create dynamic Word Clouds (aka Tag Clouds) in Microsoft Excel.

    Unlike Excel, Tableau provides a native feature to create Word Clouds with a few mouse clicks. The feature is available since Tableau version 8, but not everybody is aware of this, because Word Clouds aren’t displayed if you click the Show Me button (Tableau’s “chart gallery”).

    That’s why I want to complete my short series on Word Clouds with a step-by-step description of how to create this type of view in Tableau and two tips to make Word Clouds more effective.

    However, I am up to something more: Word Clouds are a nice little visualization and come in handy if you want to draw someone’s attention to your presentation or infographic. Having said that, they are more or less useless if you need your data to answer your questions or tell your story. The second part of today’s post will try to prove that there are much better visualizations for serious data analysis than a Word Cloud.

    (more…)

  • The Implementation of Word Clouds with Excel

    Approach, algorithm, VBA code and performance optimization of the Word Cloud with Excel implementation

    Word Cloud - VBA CodeThe previous post Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel introduced another workaround to create a word or tag cloud in a standalone Microsoft Excel workbook.

    The article briefly describes the approach, the user-defined settings, the result and the drawbacks of the workaround. It also provides 3 different versions of the workbook for free download.

    Today’s follow-up article will have a closer look into the machine room: some more details on the approach, the data structure, the algorithm, the implementation in VBA and a dirty little trick to optimize the performance of the code for inserting and formatting freeform shapes on a worksheet using VBA.

    As a little bonus, today’s post also includes a tiny Excel tool to easily split continuous texts into a list of words and their count, i.e. the data structure needed for the word cloud workaround. Of course the tool is provided for free download.

    (more…)

  • Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel

    Create dynamic Word Clouds / Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel

    Word Clouds in ExcelUnlike 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.

    (more…)