Word Clouds are a view mode on the Results page, available on questions that collect open-ended text and on closed-ended questions with a large number of answer options. Switch a question to the Word Cloud view to see its most frequent words sized by how often they appear, then customize the look or export the result.
⚠️ Note: The customization panel—the preset dropdown, the gear button, and Apply to all wordclouds—is part of the Word Clouds subscription feature. If your account does not include it, the word cloud still displays and can still be exported, but the styling controls are hidden. Survey guests do not see the mask upload, Apply to all wordclouds, or the export menu.
In This Article
Where Word Clouds Appear
There are two kinds of word cloud, and they behave differently.
| Text clouds | Answer-label clouds | |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | Respondent verbatim text | The answer option labels themselves |
| Question types | Open-ended questions, combo questions, and comment boxes attached to an individual answer choice | Closed-ended types—including multiple choice, single response, ranking, point split, and radio/checkbox grids—with at least 20 answer options |
| Available controls | Full panel, including Max words, Text clean up settings, and the four word-handling checkboxes | Visual controls only—Max words, Text clean up settings, and the four checkboxes are hidden, because the labels are used as-is |
Customizing a Word Cloud
- Select a pre-set visual theme from the Preset dropdown menu, or click the gear button to expand the control options.
- Use the sliders to change the number of words displayed (Max words) and the size difference between the most and least used words (Smallest/largest words contrast).
- Set the word angles with the five tilted A dials: click a dial to add or remove that angle, drag it to rotate, and hold Shift or Cmd while dragging to snap to 45° increments.
- Choose Portrait or Landscape from the orientation dropdown to change the shape of the cloud canvas.
- Select a different font from the font dropdown menu.
- Change the colors using a pre-set palette from the palette dropdown, or click Custom to open the color picker, where you can enter hex codes, set the background color, and change the color algorithm.
- Use the mask dropdown—set to No mask by default—to display the words inside a shape. Sixteen built-in shapes are available, plus Custom… for uploading your own.
- Clean up the text with the checkboxes: Fix misspells, Smart capitalization, Merge similar words, and 2-word phrases. Open Text clean up settings to hide common English words—with options for three stop-word levels, numbers, and one-letter words—or to hide specific words of your own under Hide other words.
- Click Save changes to keep your configuration.
The gear panel has four action buttons:
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reset wordcloud | Returns every setting to its default. |
| Shuffle | Redraws the same words in a new arrangement. |
| Update | Appears only when a mask is active; redraws the cloud inside the current mask. |
| Save changes | Saves the configuration to the question. Changes are not kept until you click this. |
💡 Tip: To standardize the look and feel across all of your word clouds, click Apply to all wordclouds. This button sits in the question header next to the Preset dropdown—not inside the gear panel—so you can use it without opening the controls. On combo questions it is labeled Apply to all.
Exporting Word Clouds
- Click the menu icon on the right side of the question header. It appears as a stacked-lines (hamburger) icon with an Export tooltip.
- Choose PNG, PDF, or EPS to download the word cloud as an image file.
- Choose CSV to download a text-only file listing each word and its frequency.
- On verbatim-capable questions with open-ended tagging enabled, two additional options are available: Download all verbatim (CSV) and Download all verbatim with codes (CSV).