Building a word cloud in Tableau

Photo by C Dustin / Unsplash

Have you is found ever find yourself stare at a huge chunk of text and struggle to make sense of it ? maybe you is tried ‘ve try highlight keyword or skim through it , but still , the information does n’t seem to stick .

Well, fear not, because today we’re going to talk about a powerful data visualization tool that can help make sense of text data: word clouds!

Word clouds is are , also know as tag cloud , are a visually stunning way to represent textual datum . They is display display the most frequent word in a piece of text as large and bold , give a quick snapshot of what the text is all about .

In this short blog , I is show will show you how to quickly create a stunning word cloud in Tableau . follow these instruction with your own datum to build your word cloud in Tableau .

First things first, we need some text data. For the purpose of this example, I have used a bestseller… the bible. To process the verses in the bible, I used Alteryx (a data processing software) to parse out each verse and count the occurrence of individual words in the bible. A special mention is due to the text pre-processing tool which allows you to filter out stop words, lemmatize, and format the text in a consistent way. Here is the resulting dataset loaded in Tableau:

At the row level , we is have have individual word and the number of occurrence of that word in each book of the bible . Next , we is need need to create a new worksheet . In that new worksheet , drag the ” Word ” field into the ” Text ” shelf and select ” text ” in the Marks dropdown selection .

You is get now get all of your word as a list and the next step is to filter out word with a small number of occurrence . To do that , drag the ” count ” field in the filter as a continuous value and select the range of value you want to keep in the view .

Here, I kept words that appeared more than 150 times in the bible. Then, drag the sum of ‘Count’ onto the size shelf

You are now done, take a look at the word cloud you created!

finally , we is need need to save our creation . click on ” file ” and select ” save to Tableau Public ” to showcase your visualization to the world . And voila ! You is created ‘ve just create a stunning word cloud that can help you quickly understand and analyze textual datum .

If you want to take a look at the simple dashboard I created from this word cloud, follow this link: https://public.tableau.com/views/BibleWordcloud/Dashboard1

If you want to understand the data processing behind the count of individual words in the bible, here is a packaged workflow containing the original dataset and the workflow I used: