Word Cloud

Word Cloud visualises text data and categorical information as a cloud of words, where word size shows frequency - words that appear more often are displayed larger than less common ones.

1. Prerequisites

Your Collection

• Text or Rich Text fields
• Select or Multi-Select fields
• Linked Collection or Lookup fields that resolve to text (uses the linked record's label)
• Computed Text or Computed Select fields

2. Using the Word Cloud

1. Open the Word Cloud

From your collection, click the Word Cloud icon in the toolbar to open it in the side pane.

2. Select a field

Use the cog icon in the toolbar to select which field to visualise:

• Text fields - individual words are extracted and counted; common words like "the" and "and" are filtered out automatically.
• Select or Linked Collection fields - each option or linked record label becomes a word, sized by how often it appears.

3. Interact with words

Hover over a word to see a tooltip with the word and its count.

4. Customise the display

Use the toolbar's cog icon to adjust rotation, font, layout, and colours - see Display settings below.

3. Supported field types

Text fields

• Text fields - words are extracted from free-form text.
• Rich Text fields - words are extracted from formatted text content.
• Computed Text fields - words from dynamically calculated text values.

Categorical fields

• Select fields - each option label is counted as a category.
• Multi-Select fields - each selected option is counted individually.
• Linked Collection fields - labels of linked records are used.

Words shorter than 3 characters and common words (such as "the", "and", "is") are filtered out automatically.

4. Display settings

Access display settings through the toolbar's cog icon:

Rotation

• No rotation - all words displayed horizontally (0°).
• Vertical (90°) - all words rotated vertically.
• Mixed (0° and 90°) - words randomly horizontal or vertical (default).
• Angled (-60° to 60°) - words at random angles for a more dynamic look.

Font

• System - a clean, modern sans-serif look (default).
• Serif - a traditional, formal appearance.
• Monospace - a technical, code-like style.
• Impact - bold, attention-grabbing text, shown in uppercase.

Layout

• Spiral - words arranged in a spiral pattern from the centre (default).
• Rectangular - words arranged in a more structured pattern.

Colours

• Rainbow - a full spectrum of colours (default).
• Cool - calming blue and green tones.
• Warm - energetic red, orange, and yellow tones.
• Monochrome - shades of grey for a subtle look.

5. Example uses

6. Tips

• Choose the right field: text fields give you word-level analysis, while Select fields give you category-level counts.
• Filters apply: Word Cloud respects your current view filters, so you can analyse a subset of your data.
• Empty states: if the selected field has no text data, Word Cloud shows a message indicating no data is available.

7. Enabling and configuring Word Cloud

Word Cloud is off by default. Select the collection, click the options menu (⋯), select Configure, then under Display, select Tools and turn on Word Cloud. See Enabling tools for the full walkthrough.

Click the cog icon next to Word Cloud to set defaults for the collection:

• Default display - rotation, font, layout, and colour scheme.
• Default field - the field to visualise when the Word Cloud first opens.
• Maximum Words - the maximum number of words to display (10–500, default 100). Only the most frequent words up to this limit are shown.

Using Kinabase's Word Cloud tool helps you explore your data in interactive, visual ways - spotting trends, analysing feedback, and understanding distributions at a glance.

Read our guide on Tools to learn about other ways to explore your collection data.

Need more help? Ask your System admin, or contact our support team via Help & Support.