Free — every feature, no licence, no watermark. Supported Power BI features: conditional formatting (fx) on word colour · format on the canvas (on-object) · cross-filtering, Ctrl+click multi-select and highlighting · bookmarks · drilldown on a hierarchy in Words · standard and report page tooltips · context menu · keyboard navigation with ARIA labels · high contrast · number formats from the model · 12 panel languages · data streaming past 30,000 rows in the Power BI service. Text analysis: free-text tokenizing, stopwords in 6 languages with automatic language detection, two-word phrases, exclusion list. Look: shapes, 42 icons, your own text or image as the outline of the cloud, 6 style templates, 32 palettes (17 colour-blind safe), sentiment colouring.
In Power BI Desktop, go to the Visualizations pane → click the three dots → Get more visuals → search for Word Cloud by TCViz.
Without it, each word is sized by how many times it appears. With it (sales, clicks, mentions), each word is sized by that measure.
Format → Style template gives you a finished design in one click (Clean, Bold, Editorial, Monochrome, Poster). Then choose a Shape and an Orientation. Anything you set by hand wins over the template.
| Well | Accepts | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 1 column | One word or phrase per row. Supports a hierarchy for drilldown. Use either Words or Text, not both. |
| Text (free text) | 1 column | Comments, answers, descriptions. The visual tokenizes them (Unicode-aware, so accents, Cyrillic and CJK characters are kept), removes stopwords and counts each word. |
| Size | 1 measure | Weight of each word. Empty → number of occurrences. In Text mode the measure of each row is added to every word in that row. |
| Color value | 1 measure | Drives the colour when Colors → Color by is Gradient by Color value or Sentiment. A sentiment score (negative to positive) works directly. In Text mode each word gets the average of the rows that contain it. |
| Tooltips | measures | Extra values in the tooltip. |
| Shape image | 1 measure | A Base64 image (data:image/png;base64,…) stored in your model. Words fill its dark area when Layout → Shape is Image. Web links are not loaded, on purpose — see Privacy. |
Limits: Power BI sends up to 30,000 rows per block. In the Power BI service the visual asks for the next blocks automatically; Power BI Desktop only sends the first block to custom visuals, and the warning icon in the visual header says so. The cloud draws up to Maximum words (default 150, up to 1,000).
None, Clean (default), Bold, Editorial (serif, ink tones), Monochrome, Poster (a heart icon with an outline). A template only fills in what you have not changed yourself.
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum words | 150 | 1 to 1,000, the heaviest first. |
| Minimum / Maximum font size | 10 / 64 | The maximum is also capped by the visual size so a single word never fills the canvas. |
| Size scale | Square root | Linear, Square root or Logarithmic. Square root keeps small words readable when one word dominates. |
| Font, Bold, Italic, Underline | Segoe UI | Any font from the Power BI font list. |
| Padding | 2 | Space between words, in pixels. |
| Lower case | Off | Shows every word in lower case (counting in Text mode is always case-insensitive). |
| Shrink to fit all words | On | If some words do not fit, the cloud is redrawn smaller until they do. |
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Detect languages automatically | On | Finds which of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian your text uses and removes the stopwords of those languages. A language is detected when at least 5 of its own stopwords appear and they make up at least 1% of the words. |
| English / Spanish / Portuguese / French / German / Italian stopwords | English | Ticked languages are always used; automatic detection adds the others it finds. |
| Minimum word length | 3 | Shorter words are ignored. |
| Exclude words | — | Comma-separated, e.g. product, company name. |
| Include two-word phrases | Off | Adds pairs such as “customer service” or “late delivery”. |
Horizontal, Vertical, Horizontal and vertical (with the % of vertical words) or Custom angles: from angle, to angle and number of angles (1–12) between them.
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Rectangle | Rectangle, Circle, Ellipse, Diamond, Triangle, Hexagon, Icon (42 icons), Text (words fill the letters of your own text) or Image (the Shape image field). |
| Stretch shape to fill | Off | Off keeps the proportions of the icon, text or image; on stretches it to the whole visual. |
| Show shape · colour · opacity | On · automatic · 12% | A light silhouette behind the words so the shape is visible. |
| Shape border · colour · width | Off · automatic · 2 | An outline drawn just outside the shape. |
| Fill the shape · minimum fill size | On · 6 | Fills the gaps with smaller repeats of your words so the shape reads clearly. Repeats are decoration: they are not counted, focused or announced twice. |
| Jitter % | 15 | How much the words wander from a perfect spiral. 0 is tidy, 100 is loose. |
| Seed | 7 | The same seed always draws the same cloud: your report looks identical every time it opens. Change it to try another arrangement. |
| Animate | On | A short fade-in when the cloud is drawn. |
| Color by | What you get |
|---|---|
| Palette | One of 32 palettes. Each word keeps its colour when filters change. 17 are colour-blind safe (Okabe-Ito, Paul Tol, Viridis, Cividis and others), marked “(cb)”. |
| Theme colours | The colours of your report theme. |
| Single colour | One colour for every word. |
| Gradient by size | From Low colour to High colour by the Size value, or along a sequential palette. |
| Gradient by Color value | The same, driven by the Color value measure. |
| Sentiment | Diverging colours centred on zero: negative Color value red, around zero grey, positive green (or the diverging palette you choose). |
Neutral value (default 0): the Color value that Sentiment shows as grey — 5.5 for a 1–10 score.
fx on Word colour (rules, gradient or field value) overrides the colour of each word in Palette, Theme colours and Single colour modes.
Background: optional background colour. Empty keeps the visual transparent.
In format mode, click the words to format them as text (font, size, colour) or click the shape or background to format those, without opening the Format pane.
← → ↑ ↓ move from word to word in order of weight, Home/End jump to the first and last, Enter or Space selects (Ctrl to add), Esc clears, Shift+F10 opens the context menu.| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A warning icon: “some words do not fit” | The visual is too small for the words and sizes asked for. | Enlarge the visual, lower Maximum words or the font sizes, or turn on Shrink to fit all words. |
| A warning icon about rows in Desktop | Power BI Desktop sends custom visuals only the first 30,000 rows. | Publish to the Power BI service, or aggregate the words in your model first. |
| “the”, “and”, “que” appear in the cloud | That language was not detected or is not selected. | Turn off automatic detection and tick the language, or add the words to Exclude words. |
| The Image shape shows a rectangle | The Shape image field is empty, is a web link, or is not a data:image/… value. | Store the image as Base64 text in the model and make it a measure. |
| Drill down does nothing | The field is in Text, or Words has a single level. | Put a hierarchy in Words. |
| The colours did not change with fx | Color by is a gradient or Sentiment, which take their colour from the values. | Set Colors → Color by to Palette, Theme colours or Single colour; fx applies to Word colour. |
| Short, repeated answers look too small | Power BI groups identical texts, so each distinct answer counts once. | Put the response ID in Size as Count. |
| The cloud is blank | Neither Words nor Text has a field. | The start page lists the three steps; drag a column to Words or Text. |
Yes. Every feature on this page is included, with no licence, no trial period and no watermark.
Words when each row already holds one word or phrase (a keyword, a product, a tag). Text when each row holds sentences people wrote (comments, answers, reviews) and you want the visual to find the words for you.
Drilldown moves through the levels of a hierarchy. A column of comments has no levels: its words are worked out by the visual, not stored in the model. Use drilldown with a hierarchy in Words, and with free text click a word to filter the rows that contain it.
Tokenizing works for any language that separates words with spaces or punctuation. Stopword lists are built in for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian, and the visual detects which of them your text uses. For other languages, add the filler words to Exclude words.
Power BI groups identical texts before they reach any visual, so with Size empty the answer “Good” counts once even if 200 people wrote it. Put your response ID column (or the comment column itself) in Size as Count: every response then counts, and Color value is averaged with the same weights. No DAX needed.
Put a sentiment score (a measure where negative means negative) in Color value and set Colors → Color by to Sentiment. Words lean red below zero and green above. With free text, each word takes the average score of the comments that mention it — so you see which words come with complaints and which with praise. A 1–10 score works too, without DAX: drag the Score column to Color value, choose Average in its field menu (Power BI starts with Sum, and the warning icon reminds you) and set Colors → Neutral value to 5.5.
Yes. Store the image in the model as Base64 text (data:image/png;base64,…), put it in Shape image and set Layout → Shape to Image. Words fill the dark part of the image. A PNG with a transparent background works best.
Yes: Layout → Shape → Text, and type it in Shape text. The cloud fills the letters.
On purpose: the layout uses a fixed Seed, so your report does not reshuffle each time someone opens it. Change the seed for a different arrangement.
Fill the shape adds smaller copies of your words to fill gaps, so the outline reads clearly. They are decoration only: tooltips, counts and the keyboard use the real words. Turn Fill the shape off to remove them.
Yes. Bookmarks keep the words you selected and show them selected when you return.
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. It follows the language of Power BI.
No. The visual has no network permission: it cannot send or load anything. See Privacy.
Questions, ideas or a bug? Email support@tcviz.com, ask in GitHub Discussions or open an issue. Please include your Power BI version and, if you can, a screenshot.