By Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and Mey Meenakshisundaram Product Manager
A picture is worth a thousand word. But if you can present the words themselves as a picture, it’s worth even more. To make this art easy and fun for everyone, this week, Word Cloud is joining the growing Power BI custom visuals family.
The world of unstructured data is having explosive growth now with text content. you see text everywhere in the social media be in product reviews, comments, messages, announcements or even simply with status updates.
While Traditional charts and visualization techniques are great at making sense of structured data, they generally fall short when it comes to textual data. We often have to look for creative new ways for presenting text data. Word Cloud makes this experience exciting and fun in Power BI.
Word Cloud is a visual representation of word frequency and value. Use it to get instant insight into the most important terms in your data.
With the interactive experience of Word Cloud in Power BI, you no longer have to tediously dig through large volumes of text to find out which terms are prominent or prevalent. You can simply visualize them as Word Cloud and get the big picture instantly and user Power BI’s interactivity to slice and dice further to uncover the themes behind the text content.
This visual also puts you in control on the appearance of the work cloud, be it the size or usage of space and how to treat the data. You can choose to break the words in the text to look for the frequency word or keep word break off to project a measure as a value of the text. You can also enable stop words to remove the common terms from the word cloud to avoid the clutter. By enabling rotation and playing with the angles allowed, you can become very creative with this visual.
Word Cloud is slick and adds a new dimension to the Power BI custom visuals experience. Check out this video to see this in action.
To use, simply import the Word Cloud from the Visuals gallery to your Power BI report and use it with a text column. Optionally you can also use a measure to provide weightage to the text. If none provided, it will simply use the frequency. Check out the formatting pane for more options.
As usual, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts and your ideas for improvements.
Enjoy!
Now, go, try it out and have some fun and explore your unstructured text data.