#Word Cloud#Word Clouds#Learn Python
Looking for a tool to generate visual representations out of the text data? A sophisticated word cloud generator is all you need to create shapes using words and only words, taken from the supplied text. The most useful the word is in the text, the more prominent it appears on the generated word cloud.
There are many word cloud generators out there in the wild and selecting one can be a difficult task, fortunately most of these are free, so you can try out as many before you settle for the one that fits your requirements and liking.
It all depends on what features you are looking for, a typical tool to create word cloud can take input text from multiple sources including web page URL, copy pasting text directly in the cloud editor or by uploading a document. Talking about features of the popular word cloud maker, it can create multiple shapes, use different fonts, colors, themes, provide clickable links on words and options to export in multiple file formats.
Additional features include exporting to SVG, PDF, using Google fonts, generating HD images, transparent backgrounds, adjusting orientation and gap between words, using custom background image and more. Sophisticated tools also let you save your creations in the cloud and share directly on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Email or embed in an online webpage.
Word cloud generators are quite popular and used a lot by students, professors, analysts, illustrators and presenters in general. Let us look at the 10 best tools out there in the wild that are feature rich and highly rated by users.
Before I continue with the various tools below, it is important to mention that the all-time popular Wordle creator Wordle.net, but starting this year, it is not working properly in many browsers, due to some recent Java Applet related security concerns. The developers of Wordle.net have not fixed the issue yet (you can check again though), and for that reason, it is listed towards the end in this article.
Wordart.com is one of the most feature rich and popular word cloud generator out there in the wild. It started back in 2010 with the name Tagul and was recently rebranded as Wordart.com. Ever after its rebranding as Wordart.com, it has grown leaps and bounds in popularity and is used around the globe by students, teachers, bloggers and presenters to create beautiful looking word arts.
Key features of Wordart.com are as below–
- Option to copy paste text or provide link of the webpage URL
- Select and remove words you don’t want to see in the word cloud
- Option to capitalize words, make all upper case or lower case
- Add links patterns to the words, so clicking on the word directs to a specific URL of the website.
- Select from multiple shapes that include hearts, animals, emojis, birthday, baby, clouds, geometry and many more.
- Select any font that you like, or even add your own fonts.
- Select word colors, Background colors, background images, rollover text color, rollover box color and much more. You can even add animations.
- Directly share the word cloud on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Email and more.
- Download the word cloud as vector image in the form of SVG or EPS.
- You can sign in to save your word clouds that can be embedded directly in your website or blog.
- Though basic features of Wordart.com are free, the advanced version requires you to purchase the subscription to remove the attribution to wordart.com.
Check out more here at – WordArt.com: Official Website https://wordart.com/
Wordclouds.com is another good tool to generate word clouds, and it’s totally free for individuals as well as for commercial use, it can run on most of the devices including smartphones, tablet, Mac, or PC, with ease and simplicity.
Like wordart, Wordclouds also lets you upload documents, add website URL as well as copy/paste text to generate word clouds. The documents and the other content you upload is stored on word cloud servers only for seconds and are removed later. Since the documents land up on their server at least once, you should be careful about uploading any confidential documents.
Talking about key features, WordClouds lets you play around with fonts, allows multiple shapes, lets you set opacity for the background, adjust gaps between words, upload your own fonts, change direction of the words, change/manipulate colors of the words, add links to the words, add remove words from the generated cloud, save generated word clouds in JPG or PNG format, or save it online to share on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, add custom background images, make specific words bigger and much more.
Check out more here at – WordClouds http://www.wordclouds.com/
Third in the list is Tagxedo which is the creation of Hardy Leung and is the top-rated word cloud generator free of cost, for individual as well as commercial use. You can use Tagxedo to create word collage from famous speeches, slogans, themes, your love letters, news articles and much more. The words are auto sized depending on the occurrence frequency in the input text.
What I love about Tagxedo is that it can grab input text from multiple channels, you can enter link of your blog, add an RSS feed link, add your Twitter id, add a google search phrase etc. and Tagxedo would extract the relevant words to generate the visually stunning word cloud, right there, in real time.
Once you have the word cloud in front of you, you can play around with it to adjust font sizes, font types, font colors, apply pre-defined themes, set text orientation, multiple shapes and much more.
Check out more here at – Tagxedo – Tag Cloud Generator
ABCya is the leader in educational games for kids and offers a word cloud generator as well, which is specifically designed for parents and teachers to help children in education and learning. What I like the most about this tool is its simplicity, it doesn’t bring in all the jazz that Wordart, Tagxedo or WordClouds bring but serves the basic purpose i.e generates simple word clouds.
ABCya has a toolbar and a unique sliding bar feature which helps you manipulate and customize the word cloud you have generated in a very intuitive manner. You can create New word cloud, edit existing, Save, print, apply word filters, set word limit, choose layouts like triangle, star, square, heart etc., define colors and fonts.
There is a button to create random word cloud, and I bet children love playing around with that. Nice, fast, simple smart tool to keep children involved while teaching.
Check out more here at – ABCya! – Create Word Cloud.
http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm
“Word it out” is another simple tool for generating visual graphics out of the supplied text. People from all walks of life are using this tool, for example, it can be used for summarizing scientific reports, or prioritizing words when learning a foreign language, doctors and teachers use it for creating presentations and student sessions etc.
Like many other tools described in this article, Word It Out also lets you ignore words that you don’t want to see in the cloud, allows for multiple color selection, adjust font sizes and layouts etc. You can also check out other word clouds that are created by the community and saved publicly, and save your own cloud.
Check out more here at – Worditout.com.
https://worditout.com/discover-word-clouds
Another simple web based tag cloud generator, it lets you select the language of your text and generates word clouds using that language. You can copy paste text, include a web URL or upload documents.
TagCrowd is the creation of Daniel Steinbock, a PhD student at Sandford University in the year of 2006. It is available free to use. Some of the key features include –
- Option to group similar words
- Select maximum number of words to show in the tag cloud
- Set max frequency of single word
- Option to save as PDF document or taking screenshot and saving to multiple image formats
- Option to customize by setting font size, overall cloud size, margins, padding, borders and background color.
- Use tilde (
) character to keep words together, like New York (NewYork). - Check out more here at – TagCrowd.
https://worditout.com/discover-word-clouds
WordSift is a set of tools (not many) for visualizing and exploring text data. Apart from the basic word cloud generation features, it has another pretty cool feature – Visual Thesaurus.
Visual Thesaurus is based on WordNet, which is a digital dictionary with visual tools, created by Princeton Psychologist, George Miller. The most frequent word from the word cloud is fed to the visual thesaurus which presents related words including antonyms and synonyms.
Official Website – WordSift
This one is for the news analysts or news researches. It is specifically used for creating word clouds out of the news articles, you supply the news category, keywords, time, location etc. and it picks up relevant and most useful news, from quality media sources to generate the clouds.
The output can further be customized by setting the word cloud shape, style and background.
Check out more about this word cloud maker here at – Tricklar Cloud Generator.
http://tricklarnews.com/australia/cloudgenerator
Here is the king who has lost its crown. Wordle has been the most popular tool to create a word cloud, it is very intuitive, easy to use and offers many features for creating visual presentations from the input text.
Wordle is one of the oldest and is also known as Wordle creator, it is still alive and ranks among the top tools in terms of usage, it allows you to copy and paste text, lets you create a word cloud from any website URL, simply copy/paste the URL in the Wordle editor and you are all done.
Though Wordle still ranks among the top, the likes of WordArt are giving a real tough competition and are growing much faster in popularity, features and overall usage.
Official Website – Wordle Generator
Though we are talking about word clouds, here is another relevant and similar tool called Vocab grabber from visualthesaurus.com. Vocab Grabber picks up the most useful vocabulary words from the supplied text and provides a visual presentation around how those words are used in context.
It lets you select any word from the generated word map and provides visual thesaurus map and definitions for that word, it also picks up relevant example text from the supplied text, to demonstrate usage.
Check out more here at – Vocab Grabber
https://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/
WordSaladApp is available as iOS and Android app and can be installed on iPhone, iPad or Android devices. It is a perfect tool for generating word clouds on the mobile phones and tablets. The app provides basic features needed to generate word clouds with customized font color, shapes, and background color.
It allows you to develop word clouds from a wide range of areas, including Wikipedia, Twitter hashtags and lots more. The basic app is available free of cost, but can be upgraded by paying a couple of dollars to get more features.
Check out more here at – Wordle Creator App
Word cloud is an excellent tool to make learning and analysis fun and interesting. Word clouds were initially used by teachers and presenters to emphasize on the key areas of the topic. But the present use of these tools has gone beyond this group, corporate entities and business organizations use word Cloud generators for analyzing customer feedback, key pain areas etc., students use word clouds in reports, bloggers use these in their blogs and much more.
The tools listed in this article stand out among the rest in terms of popularity, features, and ease of use. Do share your experience with other readers, via comments. Cheers!