Wheels of Words

After Vivienne has presented two awesome internet platforms in her previous posts, it is now my turn to show you another website where you can unleash your creativity and explore the vastness of fonts, sizes, colours and much more to pimp up your PowerPoint presentations. But be aware – only try it if you have time, and I do mean a lot of time, because once you get started you'll get addicted, at least I did.

The website I'm talking about is wordle.net, which is a tool for creating 'word clouds'. As an example, I have produced a Science Fiction (I couldn't resist...) word cloud so that you have an idea what it could look like. But this is just one out of a million options! Because these word clouds can take any shape or size, it just depends on how you like it and how much you 'play' with the program.

That's how you do it:

There is a really great FAQ section on the website so if you want to find our more read the FAQ section or better still – give it a go and explore! I will just summarize the most important steps to create a simple word cloud:

Step 1: The first step is to click on 'Create' to get started; the links appears once you open the website.

Step 2: If you’ve clicked 'Create', you'll find a text area with the heading 'Paste in a bunch of text'. You can write anything you want into this box, but there are some rules you should consider before clicking the ‘Go’ button: The size of a word is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the input text. In other words, if I type in

Hallo Hallo Hallo Hallo Hallo Vivienne Judith

Hallo will be the biggest word and Vivenne and Judith compared to Hallo pretty small. The arrangement of the words can be random, so if I type in a sentence like “Today is wonderful day”, the words will definitely not appear in that precise order and most likely the words will not be horizontal! However, if you do want to keep some words together, as I did with Science Fiction, Star Wars or Star Trek, just put the character ~ between the words that you want to go together. A little hint: the more words you enter, the better it will be.

Step 3: Once you click 'Go', the fun begins. A random image will appear with your words, it's always a surprise what will happen, because the words can have any colour and font, the arrangement of the words can be horizontal, vertical or any which way, and also the background can have any colour. If you click the button 'Randomize', the image will change immediately. If you do it for the first time, I advise you to keep on clicking 'Randomize' just to get an idea of how many different possibilities there are and maybe there's something you like. Or you can start editing the picture as you see fit. You can for example choose a font you prefer or mix and match the colours that should appear as well as how the word cloud should be arranged (vertical, horizontal etc). As I already pointed out, there are an enormous number of possibilities. I have included only two more examples of Science Fiction, but there are no limits to creativity!

Note that while Worlde is a great tool and you can do a lot with it, it also has its limitations. For example once the word cloud is created you cannot edit it any more, you would have to create a new word cloud! But it is possible to remove single words by right-clicking on them and using the resulting pop-up menu. However, be aware that these actions will re-layout the whole wordle! (without the selected word of course). So to be on the safe side, the best thing to do is to save your worlde as fast as possible. Which brings me to my next point…

Step 4: Unfortunately, you cannot save the wordle applet as a jpg. But what you can do is to take a screenshot. I hope everybody knows how to do that. (if not, the following page provided in the FAQ section explains it: http://take-a-screenshot.org/) Then you can copy the image into your word-document. By the way, I prefer open office, where one can easily convert an inserted picture into a jpg. And don't forget to press the button 'Open in window' before you take the screenshot because then the image will be bigger! And you can always print your worlde immediately, which comes in quite handy.

I hope this wasn't too confusing, but the best formula always is: learning by doing :)

So have fun creating your first word cloud,
Judith