This article explains how to generate simple tag clouds that you can use in your own presentations. Accordingly to Wikipedia, a tag cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text […] this format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence. Tag clouds have become very popular in the last decade not only to display tags in a website or blog and let the users direct access to a group of relevant articles or posts in a blog, but tag clouds are also a very powerful visualization tool that can be used beyond websites. In fact, we have used tag clouds in many business PowerPoint presentations to help the audience perceive at a glance what is the purpose of a presentation.
Generating Free Word Clouds for Presentations
In the past, one of the most popular tag cloud generation tools was Wordle (but at the time of updating this article, this tool is no longer available). It was a free online service created by Jonathan Feinberg that let you generate wonderful tag clouds online. You only require a web browser and Java enabled in your computer in order to generate tag clouds using this generator tool. Using this tool, you could generate tag clouds from your own content of the text or specify a URL with an Atom or RSS feed.
By using this tool, you could generate word cloud designs that look similar to this tag cloud example below:
Creating a Tag Cloud in PowerPoint using Add-In
In 2021, you can create a Tag Cloud directly in PowerPoint by taking advantage of the Pro Word Cloud add-in.
1. Install Word Cloud Add-in for PowerPoint
To install this add-in, open PowerPoint and go to Insert -> Get Add-ins, then search for Pro Word Cloud and Add it.
2. Enter a Bunch of Text
Once you have it installed, the next step is to add a bunch of text to your slide. You can copy and paste the text from which you want to generate the word cloud into a text shape, as we did in the example below:
3. Generate a Tag Cloud in PowerPoint
Once you have the text ready, click Create Word Cloud button to generate the tag cloud image.
Based on the information, a different weight will be assigned to each word and this will impact the final design, as words with more weight will be displayed with bigger font size. Those words with very low weight will be displayed with small font size.
The add-in will specify a default size, but if you want to increase the quality of the output image, then you can choose a custom size for the generated tag cloud. For the sake of this example, we specified a size 1600 x 900, which is proportional to the slide size with 16:9 aspect ratio used in this presentation (and by default in PowerPoint when you create a new presentation from scratch).
Then, you can generate the Word Cloud again.
Here you can regenerate the word cloud as many times as you want by clicking the Generate button. You can also save it to a public gallery or print it. If you have a virtual printer driver like PDF Creator you can print it as a JPG or PNG image. However, the easiest way to get the generated word cloud as an image is by taking a screenshot and copying it to the Windows clipboard or Office Clipboard. Using Microsoft PowerPoint you can take screenshots or use the Screen Clipping tool directly from the PowerPoint editor.
Creating a Tag Cloud Online
Aside from the PowerPoint add-in, you can use online services to create Word Clouds. One of these tools is WordArt. It is a popular tag cloud generator tool including a free version.
The first step is to import words from your document or presentation. For the sake of this demonstration, we have used a business lorem ipsum generator online to get some words relevant to a business situation.
Next step is to click the Visualize button and generate the tag cloud visualization in the browser.
Here, you can customize, not only the shapes, fonts, layout but also the style. The advanced options allow you to animate the word cloud, but for this demonstration we will use just the static option.
Finally, once you have customized your word cloud, you can export it as a PNG or JPG image. Ideally, the SVG will be the recommended option as it will let you export the graphics in a vector format (which fortunately PowerPoint handles very well now). However, the SVG option will require you to upgrade to a pro version. With the free version, you can however export the tag cloud as a PNG image, which will be enough for most of the use cases.
Once you export it and download the PNG to your computer, you can open the image in PowerPoint and insert the picture in one of the slides, as shown in the image above. Alternatively, you can insert the picture in any of the presentation templates available at SlideModel.
Using Creative Business Tag Cloud Pictures for PowerPoint Presentations
Alternatively, you can use pre-designed word clouds that help the audience to perceive a particular content, topic or area of interest. At SlideModel we have generated plenty of tag cloud designs for business presentations that can help to make impressive slides.
Our pre-designed word clouds can be used in business presentations and we have used sophisticated design tools to add shadows and special effects to the word cloud, making them look really impressive and engaging. Below you can see some examples of pre-designed word cloud pictures that you can download from SlideModel.
Business Tag Cloud Picture for PowerPoint
By subscribing to SlideModel.com you can download creative word cloud templates and tag cloud illustrations to use in your presentations. The .pptx files contains business tag cloud pictures and use them in your own presentations to create impressive slides and engage your audience.
