Last week was Dashboard Week and I learnt a lot of new techniques and visualisations. I challenged myself to use something new in each dashboard. For the second day of Dashboard Week, I used a word cloud to visualise the top trending YouTube channels. Check out my blog here to see the dashboard I created that includes a word cloud.
What is a Word Cloud?
A word cloud is a type of visualisation using text data highlighting the frequency of each word in the data. The size of each word is proportional to the frequency of the word being used. Additionally, colour can be used to represent the frequency. While the visualisation is simple, it can be more visually appealing than a simple bar chart. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to create a word cloud in Tableau using the Superstore data set to visualise customers with the highest number of orders.
Tutorial
1. Open Tableau and connect to Superstore.
2. Drag Customer Name to the Text card.
3. There are too many customers in the data. Drag Region to Filter and select West.
4. To size the customers by frequency of orders, drag while holding the right mouse button Customer Name and drop it on Size. Then select CNT(Customer Name).
5. The mark type has automatically changed to Square. Fix this by changing the mark type to Text.
6. There are still too many customers as the majority have a count of less than 5. Filter to only show the top 20 customers by dragging Customer Name to Filters and click the “Top” tab. Select By field and specify Top 20 by Customer Name (Count).
7. To incorporate colour, drag while holding Control CNT(Customer Name) to the Colour card to use colour to differentiate customers with a high number of orders.
8. Finally, right click on Region in Filters and select Add to Context to ensure the region is being filtered before the Top 20.
I hope you have found this tutorial to be helpful!
