Word Cloud Visuals

Word Clouds aggregate text data, and display the words with higher frequency of occurrence. We use them to emphasize prominent phrases or words in textual data.

World clouds include many manual setting adjustments.

We are working with the dataset Shakespeare's Sonnets, created from the datafile shakespeare_sonnets.csv. For an overview of shelves that specify this visual, see Shelves for Word Cloud Visuals.

  1. Start a new visual based on dataset Shakespeare's Sonnets. See Adding Data, Creating Datasets, and Creating Visuals.
  2. In the visuals menu, find and click Word Cloud.

    selecting word cloud chart type
  3. Note that the shelves of the visual changed. They are now X, Y, Dimensions, Measures, and Filters. The mandatory shelves are Dimensions and Measures.

    shelves of word cloud visual type
  4. Populate the shelves from the available fields:

    • Add the field Text to the Dimensions shelf.
    • Add the field Record Count to the Measures shelf.
  5. Click Refresh Visual.

    basic shelf set-up for word cloud
  6. Change the title to Shakespeare Sonnets - Word Cloud.

    • Click (pencil icon) next to the title of the visualization to edit it, and enter the new name.

    • [Optional] Click (pencil icon) below the title of the visualization to add a brief description of the visual.

  7. At the top left corner of the Visual Designer, click Save.

    clicking to save
  8. At the top left corner of the Visual Designer, click Close.

The visual should look something like this:

Completed Word Cloud Visual

To adjust the Word Cloud display, check all the available settings for this visual.

It is often interesting to compare different texts by examining their different word clouds. See Trellised Word Clouds.