Standard Report: Word Cloud

Standard Report: Word Cloud
Standard Report: Word Cloud

Using a word cloud you can get a visual representation of the number of times a word is used. The higher the frequency, the larger the word is displayed.

Word Clouds are used to report on open-text questions in the Standard Report. Below each Word Cloud there is an option to Show Responses. Click this link and the list of the responses that the word cloud represents will display.

You can also include this list of responses by default for your entire report via Report Options > Layout > Open Text. De-select the Collapse Open Text Response Tables checkbox.

Collapse Open Text Response Tables

When viewing the list of responses underneath your Word Cloud, the table shows each verbatim response by ResponseID, by default. However, you can choose to display by Response Counts. Note: This option is not available for Essay / Long Answer questions. 

  1. To do so, edit your Word Cloud and access the Layout & Options tab.
  2. Choose Response Counts from the Answer Options section. You will not see this option for Essay / Long Answer questions.View by Response Count

Default Questions

If you prefer to just display the verbatim responses from your open-text questions without the Word Cloud you can turn the Word Cloud off either on a question by question basis or globally.

Turn off Word Cloud for a single question

  1. Scroll to the Word Cloud you wish to remove in your report.
  2. Click Layout & Options and uncheck the Word Cloud option under Question Options.Remove a Single Word Cloud
  3. Last, Save the element.

Turn off Word Cloud for all questions

Go to Report Options in the upper right of your report and uncheck the Word Cloud option located in the Layout section.

Remove Word Clouds: Report Setting

What words are excluded from Word Clouds?

This question comes up quite a bit with our support team. We filter out common English words like articles and pronouns. If you would like a complete list you can download it here: excludedwords.rtf

How is the word size determined?

We do a little math behind the scenes to ensure that word clouds display nicely. It is important to note that this calculation is purely for the purposes of ensuring good-looking word clouds; it is by no means scientific.

First, we create a list of the 25 most frequent words (that are not on the excluded words list). Then for each word we do the following calculation:

total count for all 25 words minus the count for word with the least frequency (of the 25), divided by the count for that word minus the count for the word with least frequency (of the 25). This is multiplied by a value such that the word or words with the largest count are displayed with the largest font size and the word or words with the smallest count display with the smallest font size. 

Some of our customers ask "How many responses does the largest word reflect?" Unfortunately, there is not straightforward answer; as you can see from the calculation, this depends on the range of counts for the top 25 most frequent words in your dataset. 

If you wish to take a more scientific approach to your open-text data we recommend using our Open Text Analysis tool

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