Making Word Clouds in Tableau

A quick tutorial on how to make word clouds with Tableau software.

Word clouds can be a powerful visualization when analyzing keywords in a dataset. Like pie charts, there seems to be mixed opinions on the efficiency of this technique but as long as the data your analyzing and result your displaying isn’t too complicated, word clouds should still make for a valid and engaging data visualization. Word clouds can fit several viz needs, maybe you’d like to visualize product review keywords for sentiment analysis or maybe you just want to demonstrate the frequency of a word in your dataset.

Let’s get started. For this example, I’ll be using sample amazon review data available here : https://www.kaggle.com/datafiniti/consumer-reviews-of-amazon-products?select=1429_1.csv .

To get started I’ve dragged and dropped the “reviews.title” field into the “Text” box on the “Marks” shelf (note that for this example I am using filters to return only the most common reviews from a single product). Next we want to add some size to our text. We want our text sized by the count of each of these words. To do this, simply drag another “reviews.title” pill onto the “Size” box in the “Marks” shelf then change the measure of the pill to “count”.

Tableau should turn your viz into a tree map by default. As you can see, tree maps are very similar to word clouds like we’re trying to make. In the “Marks” card, where it says “Automatic”, you can select “Text” from the drop down menu to turn these tree map cells into proportionally sized text.

As you can see, the most frequent titles are larger than the others. Now this is starting to look more like an engaging visualization but let’s add one more detail to really bring out the contrast. Just like we did for the “Size” box, I’m going to drag and drop another “reviews.title” pill into the “Color” box and change the measure to “Count”.

Now the most frequent key words can really stand out from the others with size and color.

I hope I was able to show you a new technique to use in Tableau and making data visualizations. Thanks for reading!