Guide
How to Make a Word Cloud
Turning a block of text or a spreadsheet of words into a word cloud takes a few minutes and no design skill. Here's the full process, from raw text to a finished image.
1. Get your words ready
You can start from two kinds of input:
- Plain text — an article, a speech, a set of survey answers, class notes. You don't need to clean it up first; stop words like "the" and "and" are filtered out automatically.
- A spreadsheet — a CSV, XLS or XLSX file where each row is a word or phrase. If one of the columns is a number (search volume, a vote count, a rating, a score), that column can control how big each word is drawn, instead of relying on repetition.
2. Paste your text or upload your file
On the homepage, either type or paste your text directly into the box, or use "Upload a file" for CSV, XLS, XLSX, TXT, MD or DOCX. If you upload a table, a "Choose the columns" window opens automatically — pick which column holds the words ("Word / term column") and, if you have one, which column holds the weight ("Weight column"). If you skip the weight column, word size is based on how often each term repeats.
3. Generate the cloud
Click "Generate word cloud". The layout is computed instantly, in your browser — nothing is uploaded anywhere.
4. Adjust the style
Once the cloud is generated (or before, using "Customize style options" below the generate button), you can adjust:
- Color palette — a few built-in gradients, or a custom one with up to 4 colors of your own.
- Font — a large catalog of Google Fonts plus classic system fonts.
- Weight scale — linear, logarithmic or square root, useful when one word's weight is much bigger than the rest.
- Orientation — horizontal only, mixed, or random angles.
- Cloud shape — a rounded, oval silhouette, or a square one that fills the canvas edge to edge.
- Max. words and stop words — how many terms to show at most, and whether to filter out common filler words.
Don't want a specific word in the cloud? Click it directly to remove it, or type it into "Remove a word by typing it" before it even shows up.
5. Download your word cloud
Click "Download PNG". The image has a transparent background, so it drops cleanly into a slide, a document, a report or a web page without a white box around it.
Tips for a better-looking word cloud
- Fewer words usually looks better. A cloud with 300 words gets cramped and hard to read; 40-100 tends to leave enough room for the important terms to actually stand out. Lower "Max. words" if the result feels busy.
- Watch out for one word dominating everything. If a single term is far heavier than the rest (a keyword with 10x the search volume of anything else, say), it can shrink every other word to the point of being unreadable. Switching "Weight scale" to logarithmic or square root compresses that gap without changing the actual ranking.
- A bigger browser window means a bigger export. The downloaded PNG matches the size the cloud is rendered at on your screen, so maximizing your browser window before generating gives you a higher-resolution image — useful if you're printing it or using it full-bleed on a slide.
- Clean your text first if it has boilerplate. Paste the actual content you care about — a transcript's speaker labels or a document's headers/footers will otherwise show up as "words" too.
- Pick a font for the amount of text you have. Dense, narrow fonts fit more words into the same space; wide display fonts look better with a shorter, punchier list.
Frequently asked questions
How many words should I use?
There's no hard limit, but somewhere between 40 and 100 words tends to give the best-looking result — enough variety to be interesting, without so many that the smallest words become unreadable. You can set this directly with "Max. words".
Can I make a word cloud from a PDF?
Not by uploading the PDF directly — copy the text out of it and paste it into the text box instead. Direct PDF upload isn't supported yet.
What image format does it export as?
A PNG with a transparent background, at the resolution the cloud is displayed at on your screen.
Does this work on a phone or tablet?
Yes — it runs in any modern mobile browser the same way it does on desktop, since everything happens client-side. A larger screen just gives you more room to see the cloud while you adjust it.
Related guides
- Make a word cloud from a CSV or Excel keyword list — for weighting words by search volume, votes or any numeric score.
- Add a word cloud to PowerPoint or Google Slides.
- Word cloud ideas for teachers and students.
Ready to try it?
Make your word cloud — it's free