Word cloud visualization in Power BI
Get to know a word cloud
Word cloud is an elegant way to visualize text data. The more words appear in the data, the larger size of those words in the word cloud.
A word cloud can effectively convey important information in a colorful way.
There are several ways to create a word cloud such as a word cloud generator website, Python/R programming, and visualization tools. Among these methods, Power BI is the most convenient for tabular data in my opinion since it can create a word cloud in a short time without coding. Moreover, a word cloud created by Power BI is easy to adjust and interactive with other data in the table.
Step summary
- Get data
- Download WordCloud visual
- Create a word cloud
- Adjust the word cloud
1. Get data
Download data from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/datatattle/covid-19-nlp-text-classification/download
It is the Twitter data during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Open Power BI. Click the Home tab, select Getdata, and select Text/CSV.
Home tab > Get data > Text/CSV
Then, select the downloaded .csv file and Load the data.
2. Download WordCloud visual
In the Visualizations plain on the right-hand side, click at 3 dots and select “Get more visuals”
Visualizations plain >3 dots > “Get more visuals”
This will open the visual marketplace. Search for Word Cloud using the search area on the right-hand side. Click on the Word Cloud product (please make sure that it is the same one like the below image. Then, click Add.
Search Word Cloud > Click Word Cloud > Add
Now, you will see the WordCloud icon in the Visualizations plain.
3. Create a word cloud
Click on the WordCloud icon in the Visualizations plain.
You will see an empty visualization.
In the Fields plain on the right-hand side, select the text column in which you want to create a word cloud (OriginalTweet in this example).
❗ Make sure that you have selected that empty visualization before selecting the column.
A word cloud of this column will be created.
Click WordCloud icon > Select a text column
4. Adjust the word cloud
- Expand the word cloud by dragging the angle or side.
- Exclude the stop words.
Visualizations plain > Stop words On > Default Stop Words On
Stop words are a set of commonly used words such as to, for, and as. We usually remove stop words to clearly see the important words in our data.
You can do this by selecting a word cloud. Then, in the Visualizations plain, click on Format your Visual icon. Turn the Stop Words to On and toggle the Stop Words and Turn the Default Stop Words to On.
You can even add your stop words by typing in the Words box under Stop Words. For example, I want to exclude ‘https’ and ‘around’ from the word cloud. Exclude multiple words using a space.
- Reduce shown words
Visualizations plain > General > Reduce max number of words
If a word cloud looks too clustered, you can reduce the number of shown words.
In the Visualizations plain, toggle the General tab and reduce the max number of words. In this example, I reduce it from 200 to 100.
- Not rotate words
Visualizations plain > Rotate Text Off
By not rotating the words in the word cloud, the visualization will look more formal and readable.
In the Visualizations plain, turn the Rotate Text off.
As you can see that creating a word cloud from Power BI is so simple.
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