Text Analysis using Excel

There are plenty of companies out there that claim to offer complete end to end text analysis solutions to ‘help you uncover actionable insights from customer feedback’. These solutions tend to vary wildly in sophistication and usefulness, from the downright useless to the one or two that are at the cutting edge of text analysis.

What they all have in common though, is that you will eventually need to pay to access their services. Most likely, you will also have to upload your customer feedback, which may be quite sensitive, onto their platforms and servers.

One way to get around this is by running basic yet insightful text analysis from the 'comfort' of excel.

A word count in excel (or very basic topic modelling)

A simple word count of unique word occurrences can go a long way towards uncovering the overall themes in the text, once common words are removed.

A word cloud in Excel

A word cloud is basically a fancy way to display a word count. In terms of actual usefulness for text analysis, a word count and associated bar chart is far more insightful. However, word clouds do look pretty.

Sentiment Analysis

When we read a sentence, we can usually infer from the subjective information supplied what the sentiment, or mood, of that sentence is. Sentiment analysis is possible in excel, albeit with a caveat — you need to have accompanying scores to go with your feedback.

Theme / Topic modelling in excel

When we read a sentence, we can usually infer from the subjective information and context supplied what the overall themes or topics are. 

Topic modelling is a form of text mining to identify patterns and hence topics in a body of text without needing to read it; it is an entire area of linguistic research in its own right. And any online text analysis solution that can do this even partially well currently requires a powerful semantic and linguistic processing engine, backed up by extensive database of topics.

However, if you know your body of text well enough, and it is sufficiently narrow, topic modelling is possible in excel.

I go into step by step detail (with screenshots!) of my approach in the full article on my site.