Tag: word cloud makers

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

The 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.

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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.

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